Dennis posted these interesting bikes:
High starting prices on these, nobody is bidding.
http://page6.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/
http://page4.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/
http://page4.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/
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I am very curious to know if those bikes actually *sell* for anything close to those prices in Japan. Do they? Dennis? Does anyone know? That rose-colored Cinelli is nice, but at over 3K for the bike, maybe a bit too nice. And I'm extremely curious to know if that Colnago Arabesque would really sell for 5K.
I recently sold a different sort of collectable to a japanese buyer, through an intermediary I had done other business with..the buyer speaks no english, and is not a net expert, so the intermediary, his friend, helped him make the purchase. I imagine that for every one Japanese collector on ebay, there might be 5 or 10 people who buy on the secondary market, in-country, at even higher prices.
I imagine some of those collectors do a fair bit of re-selling, for a nice premium. 'course, we've all done that, from time to time..
Charles Andrews SoCal
Concerning Carlos Kleiber one of the greatest of all post-war conductors:
The glamour often associated with a conductor's life held no appeal for him; he preferred to stay at home in Munich. He once told Leonard Bernstein: "I want to grow in a garden. I want to have the sun. I want to eat and drink and sleep and make love and that's it."