Catalogs are also a great resource for collectors. Over time, they can give an idea of what’s out there on the market and – if you bother to check the hammer prices afterwards, which I strongly advise – what certain items may fetch. The operative word is “may,” of course; more on that in a moment.

If you collect within a narrow field, you may even see an item come up for auction more than once over a period of a few years. If it’s a rare or one-of-a-kind piece, it can help you to know what it sold for the last time it went on the block.

Lot descriptions are also informative, both for what they contain and what they don’t. A really good auction house with knowledgeable experts – Heritage Auctions in Dallas, say – will publish beautiful catalogs with insightful descriptions that contain valuable details about an item’s uniqueness, provenance, condition, etc. But don’t let that stop you from doing your own research: If you collect Theodore Roosevelt memorabilia, for example, and a letter from Teddy to a Mr. Joe Blow comes up for auction, do your homework and try to find out who Joe Blow actually was, if the auctioneer hasn’t done so already. Special associations often go unnoticed and only add to an item’s worth.

Here’s an example: A couple of years ago, a short 1909 Christmas greeting written by legendary 19th-century boxer/Civil War veteran Mike Donovan to a Capt. Jack Crawford came up for auction. Donovan’s handwriting wasn’t so legible, and the lot description querulously noted that Donovan referred to Crawford as “the Poet Scant.” “Scant”? I was confused too.

So I Googled “Capt. Jack Crawford, Poet Scant.” It turned out he was Captain Jack Crawford, “the Poet Scout,” who was a lot more famous than Donovan (at least, outside of pugilistic circles). Both men had been born in Ireland and served in the Union Army, so they obviously had some common bonds. Crawford became a cavalry scout in the Indian Wars and among the first to arrive at the site of the Little Bighorn after Custer’s Seventh Cavalry were massacred. Crawford was also famous as a frontier poet, hence the moniker: He used to pen his verse at campfires – while his compatriots were drinking, eating beans and farting, one imagines – published several books (pretty avidly collected today) and was active on the public reading circuit. AND he was a pal of Buffalo Bill Cody, with whom he later worked the Wild West show circuit.

All of this evaded the writer of the lot description, but it greatly enhanced the letter’s value – both to your humble correspondent and the guy who outbid me!

Anyway … bear in mind that while hammer prices may provide an indicator of an item’s fair-market value, nothing’s written in stone. Just as on eBay when two goons get in a bidding war and drive an item’s price ski-high up five days before the end of the auction, people in an online or live auction can get crazy and bid far beyond what they reasonably should. (Figure in the buyer’s premium as well.) So take hammer prices with a few grains of salt.

Conversely, you may get lucky – as I have more than once – and find a great item BURIED in an auction catalog among unrelated items: for example, an uncommon film star autograph hidden among sports memorabilia. Not only will other collectors of that film star miss the autograph (unless they collect sports memorabilia too) but the sports people will probably ignore the film star as well. Then you have the opportunity to nab a great item far below what it would ordinarily sell for.

In a nutshell: Look hard for those hidden gems among the other lots!

1. It’s the world’s largest flea market. Virtually EVERYTHING shows up there sooner or later. If you’re patient and experiment with keywords, you can find some great stuff at incredible prices just because other eBayers miss them.

2. Entrepreneurs of all types can sell online and even make a living without having Web sites of their own. eBay is the embodiment of cyber-capitalism. I predict that e-commerce will achieve in this century what America and Pamela Anderson couldn’t in the last: the destruction of communism, once and for all.

3. It’s a great place to meet people with the same interests. I’ll introduce you to a fellow collector and rival bidder of mine in an upcoming blog on AmeriCollector.com. Stay tuned.

4. The countdown feature is a big improvement. When sniping, you no longer have to refresh the page to time your bid.

5. The rating system gives a decent idea of the kind of seller you’re dealing with. I’ve run into a few incompetents and several cheapskates – people who charged five bucks for Priority Mail shipping, then sent the item by media mail for a buck – but after 650+ transactions I’ve never really been ripped off by anyone. (Paying with PayPal helps.) And when a seller failed to communicate with me after I won an item – at a steal, I might add; I thought he was going to renege on my win – eBay was very good about giving me his phone number so I could call the schmuck.

6. The “Watch This Item” feature is a big help. Ditto for “Buy It Now or Best Offer.” And did you know that if you have the current high bid, you can ask the seller to end the auction early and sell the item to you on “Buy It Now” if you can agree on a price? It beats the hell out of running the risk of losing it to another bidder.

7. You can collect without leaving the house. Sure, that can be bad for brick-and-mortar collectibles dealers, who make their money face-to-face, but let’s be honest: More often than not, those same dealers buy and sell on eBay themselves (and even buy items on eBay and re-list them there). eBay is no different from any other auctioneer – from Sotheby’s to Railroad Memories – that allows absentee bidding; they just do it online, on a larger scale. If exhibitors at antique and collectibles fairs or the guy who owns the sports memorabilia shop in downtown Podunk hate it when visitors look at their goods and say “I’ve seen it for less on eBay,” then those vendors should price their stuff competitively instead of whining about overhead.

Seven things I HATE about eBay

1. Outside auctioneers can get away with auctioning stuff without disclosing that there’s an established reserve price. I was the high bidder on an item in a GoAntiques auction and there was no indication that a reserve price had been set – let alone that I hadn’t met that reserve price – yet, GoAntiques wouldn’t sell the item to me; instead, they re-listed it. In effect, eBay failed to regulate the GoAntiques auction they hosted, allowing GoAntiques to outbid me themselves in order to try for a better price later. How is that different from “shill bidding,” in which you bid in your own auction to up the ante on an item – which is COMPLETELY against eBay rules, and for which you can be banned from eBay? (I e-mailed complaints both to GoAntiques and to eBay, but neither responded.)

2. There are legions of idiots who use every conceivable keyword to get their items in your face. That’s also against eBay rules: Crack a few heads already!

3. The new system of encrypting bidders’ names sucks. Under the old system, when people’s eBay “handles” were shown, I learned the bidding habits of folks I regularly bid against: Some would bid high, some wouldn’t; some would bid in huge chunks, others would bid in little increments, like old biddies (no pun intended) at a high-stakes Vegas Pai Gow table; some were even professional collectibles dealers, who wouldn’t bid beyond a certain point if they couldn’t resell the item at a reasonable profit. This was valuable knowledge that enabled me to bid effectively. Nowadays it’s more anonymous, with names like “t***1.” (I haven’t yet tried to keep track of these encryptions, but I’m going to start making a list.) eBay claims this is to protect bidders’ privacy, but it’s not nearly as much fun as bidding against missfit and whitezombie.

4. The word count for feedback is too low. If you really want to blast a lousy seller, 80 characters aren’t nearly enough.

5. It’s a pain in the butt to sift through 16 pages of feedback to find the negatives and neutrals. eBay should make it easier to pull up bad and ambivalent feedback. And the way they figure the percentage rating seems calculated to make all but the crappiest sellers look like saints: I don’t think I’ve ever seen one with a rating of less than 98.5 percent.

6. I’ve NEVER gotten a free discount or premium. I’ve been eBaying since 2001, made 650+ transactions and have a 100 percent feedback rating, and I’ve never gotten so much as a free lady’s disposable razor or other piece of useless crap as a reward. How do you get one of these mythical discounts, anyway?

7. eBay junk mail is criminally boring. It’s more fun to read the reams of unintelligible paper that the Sierra Club mass-mails to solicit donations. Please, spare the trees…

www.ebay.com