About Us

I guess it's about time this site gets an "About Us" page, or more accurately an "About Me" page. In the coming months I'll be adding an online store to this site and if you're anything like me you want to know who you're buying from.

My name's Cliff Aliperti and I've been a collector my for as long as I can remember and a seller nearly as long! I am an absolute pack-rat with varied (some say...ahem, too varied) interests. My first love is baseball and so my collecting began with baseball cards when I was pretty young. Where my collecting experience often differs from others is that I was lucky enough to have an uncle who started dealing baseball cards in the late 1970's. I can still remember my uncle and my cousin trading my father and myself all of the baseball cards in my grandparents house for all of the stamps (Dad collected stamps then). I never got too serious about the stamps, so I quickly regretted that decision!

My first magazines were sports magazines. More specifically beginning again in the late-70's my grandfather would pass along his copy of Sports Illustrated each week when he came over to my parents to play bridge. SI can accumulate pretty quick, so I had a magazine collection in no time. Probably more because I never throw anything out and always come across dusty boxes of goods you can once in awhile still purchase an early 80's Sports Illustrated from me that will have my grandfather's name on the mailing label!

Anyway, by the mid-80's, when I was a teen-ager, I was assisting my uncle at baseball card shows around Long Island and soon enough part of my fee was a few feet of table space. There begins my dealer career! The mid-80's were booming times in the baseball card biz, so I could often unload newer cards featuring players from my youth for older cards featuring players from my father's youth. This added some value to my collection.

Since the time I began doing those shows I've come to think of my stock as my rotating collection. Not being a rich man this gives me a way to possess items that I would never otherwise lay my hands on. Even better, with the internet I can display items in my collection long after I've sold them to another, more traditional collector!

But that's getting ahead of myself a little. After high school, but before college, I spent a couple of years doing the card shows as my sole means of employment. That was a tough couple of years. It was the early 90's, and as booming as the card business was in the mid-80's, it was dying just as hard by the early 90's. Eventually I made the decision to close-up shop and get an education.

Now up until this time besides baseball card collecting and that youthful foray into stamp collecting, I had tried my hand at comics, coins, first-edition books, and stacks and stacks of magazines which I didn't really consider part of any collection per se, but rather something I just couldn't bring myself throw away!

Before and during college I did a lot of writing, concentrating on fiction but only publishing some non-fiction. I guess I could write okay, but my stories usually got a little muddled before I could reach the end. As a writer I'm a voracious reader. So I started out shooting for a degree in creative writing at SUNY Oswego and after a transfer ended up finishing with a degree in history at SUNY Stony Brook. I'm mentioning this because when we talk about magazines we're often talking about fiction and history. Well, this paragraph gives you a little of the basis for a good deal of my interest.

After college I spent four years working in the Advertising department of a national magazine based in Manhattan. Quite honestly office life did not appeal to me, especially the set hours. Poor me, right? It was a great education though, as somehow I had made it through four years of college without touching a computer, and learned just about everything I know now while sitting in my cubicle for the magazine. I was working for about a week before I discovered eBay.

No, wait. Actually the Christmas before that I was introduced to eBay by my uncle (of all people!). He had since retired and was spending a lot of his time leisurely selling (still baseball cards and sports memorabilia) online. I was amazed at the auctions, the bidding action, the buying and selling and what looked like easy money (yeah right!). I was hooked. Problem was I didn't have a computer and even if I had I wouldn't have known what to do with it!

I bought my computer after about a month working for the magazine. I established my eBay identity, things-and-other-stuff, in April 2000, which is when I began selling online. Within two years, and I don't know where I got the nerve to do this, I bought a program for building websites (FrontPage) and some web space and began operating things-and-other-stuff.com. By April 2004 I was able to leave my Manhattan job behind to concentrate on selling collectibles full-time. My site was originally filled with several different types of collectibles. By 2004 and to this day it's 100% movie stars and collectibles.

Well, the movie collectibles began as an impulse buy and turned into my main area of interest for two to three years. I was happily selling sports memorabilia and used books on eBay and then one day I bid on some movie photos and then, boom, by 2005 most of my stock was movie collectibles. But I began to realize that the category had become a little too competitive and also that I was selling too many lower priced items to make any kind of a living. It's difficult to rely on bulk. I needed a new niche.

I thought about what I liked (and now you'll see why I gave you this long-winded personal history!). I liked sports, obviously movies, literature, history ... magazines! I had been selling sports and movie titles all along and would occasionally buy unrelated titles when I could find them at the right price. But magazines seemed like an area where I could put wide-ranging interests to work to mine out items of interest to others. So far, so good.

I love handling the magazines and have learned a lot working with them. It's great to get sidetracked from the day's work poring over an old issue that I'm supposed to be readying for auction or sale. I've never known too much about the classic illustrators (outside of Rockwell, but everyone knows Rockwell, right?) and so I've had a good time learning about them. Now I see magazines that have something of interest on every single page. Seriously! There might be a classic cover with two or three stories by major fiction writers and profiles of a sports or movie star with valuable advertising mixed in between. How great is that?

I began collecting-old-magazines in September 2005 and have been brainstorming, looking for the perfect off-eBay Store for a couple of months before that even. When I discovered SBI! I realized I had found the perfect host for my magazine site. Actually they are much more than a host, but that's a story for another page on the site! I've been researching everything from the most rudimentary shopping carts to full-scale e-commerce solutions and think I've finally found the most perfect solution for me. Well, for you and me. At least it tested well, both from the customer and administrative end. So look for it soon, I'm hoping to have the collecting-old-magazines store operating by Fall 2006. We'll see.