Bruce Hershenson, the founder of eMoviePoster.com, contributed this article as a bonus feature for The Overstreet Guide To Collecting Comics, which is now on sale.

Almost everyone has heard of collecting coins, stamps, baseball cards and of course, comic books, but only a surprisingly small number of people have even heard of collecting original vintage movie posters! Why is that? Because the other types of collectibles were all originally sold directly to the general public, and in very large quantities, so large numbers survive, and there is always the chance of someone discovering a large collection lurking in anyone’s attic.

But movie posters (the ones displayed at the movie theaters) were never sold to the general public (at least not until the 1970s), and even if you begged a theater owner to give you one, they could not, because that poster was needed to be used for display at the next theater showing that movie. The only people to have movie posters were the owners of “poster exchanges”, the companies that distributed posters to theaters. On rare occasions, movie posters are found in closed down theaters or in the homes of former theater owners, or in torn down buildings where they were used for insulation between walls and under floors!

So the rarity of older movie posters is many times that of any other collectible! In the movie poster hobby, when there are 50 examples of a poster from the 1930s, that is considered a “common title,” and there are lots of titles from the 1930s and earlier where not even one example of the movie poster is known to exist, and many others where only a few are known.

This rarity surprisingly works against the hobby growing. Quite often I am contacted by people who want a specific poster, and would be happy to pay above what it has sold for the past few times, and I have to tell them that it is likely that all the known examples are in collections where the owners would likely not sell at any price.

It is also hard to get new collectors when there is next to no one who started collecting as a child. Millions of people started out collecting coins, stamps, baseball cards and of course, comic books when they were young, and when they get older and start having disposable income, they often return to the hobby of their youth, which is almost never collecting movie posters!

But recent years have seen a major new branch of the movie poster collecting hobby emerge. Starting after the great success of Star Wars in 1977, and the insatiable demand for posters that the movie produced, the creators of movie posters started selling them directly to dealers, who then re-sold them directly to collectors. While there are a few very rare titles and styles of posters, most post-1980 posters are available in far larger numbers than the older posters.

Even into the 1990s, the number of full-time poster dealers, collectible shows and auctions was very low. In 1990, I organized the first ever all movie poster auction by a major auction house, and it took in just under $1,000,000 (with one poster from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari auctioning for $39,600!), but such auctions were few and far between.

In 1999, the Internet (primarily through eBay) finally brought a way for new collectors to easily enter the hobby and I moved my million dollar business entirely onto eBay that year, and over the next few years my list of customers grew from 2,500 to over 25,000, and my sales doubled to over $2,000,000 a year!

In 2008, I moved my entire business off eBay onto my own site, eMoviePoster.com, and over the four years since have nearly doubled my sales to just under $4,000,000 a year, and we auction an unbelievable 110,000 posters per year! In addition there are now several other competing auction sites, and hundreds of dealers with often elaborate selling sites, many with thousands or tens of thousands of posters online.

Best of all, an awful lot of posters can be purchased for well under the cost of a reproduction of the very same poster. Around half of the 110,000 posters we auction each year sells for $14 or under, with many thousands selling for a few dollars or under. A new collector with a modest budget can still put together a fun collection of posters that can easily be displayed and enjoyed on their walls.

What is the best way to enter the hobby? The first stop should be our Auction History database where you will find just under three quarters of a million accurate sales results, and almost all of them have enlargable images of the posters sold! Using this, you can quickly identify posters you might like to collect, and ones that fit the budget you have.

I often hear dealers tell new collectors that years later they will look back and regret many great deals they turned down, but I feel it is usually just the opposite. I advise new movie poster collectors to take their time and enter the hobby slowly, because their tastes are liable to evolve over time, and they don’t want to find that they no longer want many of their earliest purchases.

I have been in this hobby so long (I have collected for over 40 years, and have auctioned full time for over 23) and I have reached the point where a lot of the collectors who bought from me many years ago are now turning to me to auction off their collections, and a large number of them have made a large profit from the money they spent on their collection over the years.

It is this that makes movie poster collecting such a great hobby. You can spend your time on a hobby you love, and have your walls filled with wonderful art throughout that time, and when the time comes that you want to sell your collection you will likely get far more back than you put into it. It doesn’t get better than that!

What are some specifics about how to start? Here are some pointers:

1) Buy a few inexpensive posters and see how you like them. You can buy inexpensive frames to display them with from many sources. You may find over time that you lose interest in some of your purchases, but fortunately the frames are reusuable because almost all posters are standard sizes.

2) Consider collecting on a specific actor or theme. You might try to get one poster here from all the Steven Spielberg movies, or you might collect posters from movies about car racing. The possibilities are limitless, because there have been movies about every subject under the sun for well over 100 years. Naturally you will find collecting in the most popular areas, like James Bond or Star Wars, is far more expensive than choosing some less popular area!

3) Be prepared for your areas of interest to evolve or drastically change! Lots of collectors find that as they get deeper into the hobby their choice of what to collect changes dramatically. Many collectors buy many inexpensive posters at first and later start buying fewer, more expensive posters.

4) Don’t forget that the main idea of collecting is to have fun! If you also make money the day you sell your collection, great, but if it turns into something you don’t enjoy, then you might as well get a part-time job. Buy what you personally love, but try not to overpay (except on very rarely offered items) because part of the fun is getting a poster you want at a price you wanted to pay!

I have done nothing but auction movie posters for the past 23 years, and been in collectibles for the past 45 years, and I am certain that there has never been a better time to collect vintage movie posters! Thanks to the Internet, you can see large full-color images of what you buy before you buy it, and there are tens of thousands of auctions every month, and millions of posters offered at fixed prices. If you take your time, you will likely be able to slowly put together an excellent collection of exactly what you want to collect, and at prices you want to pay!