Shopping for Spirou Journal

I’ve been spending far too much time recently looking for affordable back issues of Spirou Journal.

You see weird things happening when you do this kind of shopping.

Collections Versus Single Issues

I started out buying individual issues of Spirou Journal. I got lucky the first time I went searching in that multiple sellers were selling bundles of issues. I did buy a few one off issues for specific reasons (an early Smurfette appearance in one), but mostly got a better deal buying 10 or 20 issues at a time.

From a production point of view with this blog, single issues are the best. They’re easy to lay flat and get a good picture or scan of any page.

I haven’t seen too many of those bulk lots lately, but I have found lots of the hardcover collections of the issues, starting as low as $10, in some cases. Those are also easier to put on a bookshelf and do, indeed, look more impressive that way.

Shipping Rates

Canada is the worst for shipping costs. It’s $15 to get anything out of that country.

You can find cheaper options in France, Belgium, and Germany. It’s no secret that postal rates can get very strange. Witness the story of the guy who discovered it was cheaper to mail something from China to his front door in New Jersey than to ship something across the street.

Shipping rates in France are all over the place. There are many affordable options to get things across the Atlantic Ocean, and I appreciate the cheaper ones. I can wait for the slow shipment; I’d rather spend my money on more books.

The trick is to find dealers who use the “books and brochures” rate, which is the French equivalent of Media Mail and it works internationally. If you can combine shipping on ordering more than one book at a time, all the better. You can get books shipped across the Atlantic for under $10 that way, which is more than reasonable. You won’t get tracking and it’ll take a couple of weeks, but I don’t need instant gratification in my book buying.

The Seedy Underbelly of eBay Sellers

You occasionally trip across the wildly out-of-control sellers on eBay pricing their books like this:

Yes, that’s more than $100 in shipping costs on a book the dealer is selling for $10.87. And this is a 2-pound book. In America, you can ship that via Media Mail for $6. You can Priority Mail it for less than $10.

I have to think that the dealer is using shipping costs as a profit center. That’s the one thing that bothers me. Some people like to hide their costs in shipping so they can compete on item prices in the search results on eBay. It shouldn’t work, though, as eBay includes the shipping fees in its price strategies if you’re sorting by price.

eBay also takes its cut from the seller from the final price including shipping, mostly to work around the people who’d keep the prices low to pay less to eBay while making up for it in insane shipping prices.

There’s one dealer in America who has two of the hardcover compilations of Spirou Journal issues for less than $20 each. I took a shot and sent him an offer for $40 for the pair, including shipping. He laughed me off saying that he’d make almost no money that way.

I was confused until I realized the only way that logic worked was if he was counting on the excess shipping payment as the profit center.

To prove it to myself, I shot him a second offer for the books at cover price if he’d ship them together as Media Mail. That would mean I’d only pay $6 in shipping instead of $18. He never responded.

Searching for Spirou Journal on eBay

If you’re looking to buy some of these glorious Spirou Journal compilations, please don’t. Leave them for me.

If you insist, though, I have some tips for you.

Include “Recueil” in the search. That’s the French word for “collection” and many dealers use it in their titles for these books.

Be sure your search settings are set to “Worldwide” by default so eBay shows you the French and/or Belgian dealers. There are some good German dealers out there, too, but keep an eye on the shipping costs there.

Standard eBay recommendation: Add a book you might want to buy to your Wishlist. That will prompt the dealer to offer you a deal on it. Some dealers check that daily and might send you an offer that’ll save you a few percent.

Also, you can add a book to the cart and leave it there for 24 hours to see if that prompts anything.

If the dealer has “Make an Offer,” give it a shot. It doesn’t hurt, but don’t insult them. I’ll usually send an offer that helps offset some or all of the shipping costs. Or — and this is purely my own mind game with myself — I’ll send an offer that will round down the final cost. If the item plus shipping is $31 or $32, I’ll send an offer just to bring it down to $30.

Paying For eBay on eBay

eBay now allows you to pay for orders on eBay with money made on your eBay sales. I’m not sure what the minimum threshold you need to get into this program. I was either invited in or made a request to be added to it. I’m in now.

There’s one annoying twist to the program, though: You can’t spend that money with an overseas dealer. I’m sure there’s a perfectly valid rationale for this, but it is frustrating. There are so many cheaper comics I could pick up out of France, but I can’t use the funds already in my eBay account to do so.

The deal also doesn’t work with Canada.

I’m sure there’s a reason for this dealing with international finances and all, but it is still annoying. On the bright side, it has meant that there’s a lot of money I haven’t spent on eBay because of this.

Still, I hold out hope someday that they’ll clear this up, so I’m not moving my money out just yet.

Be Warned

If you’re in the U.S. and search for “Spirou”, 90% of the results that will get returned will center on 1970s American Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Of all the sins of the Nixon administration, this is the one that cuts closest to home now. If you’re looking for campaign pins, books about the disgraced Veep, or watches, though, you’re set.

You’ll also get some misspelled listings for the Spyro the Dragon video game.

This is all why I try to narrow my search down by using “Spirou Journal”, “Spirou Journal album”, or “Spirou Journal Recueil”.

Other Sources and Tips

Give Amazon a chance. They have a lot of third-party booksellers on there, and many of them have Spirou collections out there. Some of them are even in the United States and offer free shipping. The annoying part of Amazon’s interface is that you have to click through individual listings to see what the prices are on many of the books.

If the seller is overseas, the good news is that Amazon will adjust shipping rates if you buy more than one book at a time. It seems like such an obvious thing, but see the earlier story about the eBay seller who uses that as his profit center.

You can get lucky on searches of online book thrift stores like AbeBooks, BetterWorldBooks, ThriftBooks, or DiscoverBooks, though you might get books with lots of barcode stickers on the covers and some major wear. I’m not collecting these books for collecting’s sake. As long as they’re readable and not completely falling apart, I’m OK with it.

And, to be honest, if a Spirou Journal collection is falling apart, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just a bunch of magazines glued into the same binding. So what? Break them apart into their issues if all goes wrong. I haven’t had anything that major happen yet, though I have had some isolated pages that want to come loose.

There are many of these thrifting bookstores now, and they often list on eBay as well as a website of their own. If you see a listing on eBay, do check their website before buying anything. One such site I looked at was running a $5 off coupon. The eBay sites do offer coupons if you buy multiple books, though.

Keep your eyes open, explore all your options, and strike on the best deal.