Trip to House of Zion

I had to travel to Santa Clara California for 4 days of meetings last week. I have been going to Santa Clara pretty regularly for work, but usually it is a quick day trip on the company shuttle. This is the first time that I have had to spend overnight, let alone 3 nights. Knowing that Ed Rosen's House of Zion is based out of Redwood City, about 20 minutes up 101 from Santa Clara, I decided to see if he would have some time to meet. After a few e-mails, we agreed to meet at his office on Tuesday night.

When I got to his office, I was surprised at what I saw. It was a small warehouse filled with boxes and boxes of stamps. He had pulled a few collections of plateblocks out for me to look at, so I started with those when I got there. I didn't find much of what I needed, but managed to fill in a half dozen or so. Then I started going through boxes. I found a box of Israel flight covers that I thought looked interesting. It must have had 300 covers, although many were duplicates. Unfortunately, Ed priced it at $750 dollars, which was a lot more than I was expecting. I guess E-bay has distorted my view of the stamp market, because I would expect a large lot like this to fetch under $300 on E-bay.

Next up was a bunch of Artist signed FDC's. These he priced at $9 each, which is about triple what I would have expected to pay. Just this week, I picked up about 50 artist signed presentation folders on E-bay for less than $5 each, and I tend to think these are much more interesting than just the normal FDC signed by the artist, since each is designed by the artist and expands on the theme of the stamp. Is my sense of the market distorted due to the low prices I can pay for items on E-bay, or is it that the retail prices that I was being charged haven't adjusted to the new reality of the stamp market?

The last box I looked at was a large box that Ed had labelled postage. It was basically just random sheets and part sheets that were sold at face value. I picked up a bunch of plate blocks I needed for my collection here, and probably would have found more had it not been so late. I called it a night after about 3 hours of looking through the warehouse. We will see if I make it back there anytime soon.