Last September (2007), I attended a seminar in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, to learn about making money selling on eBay. Although a few months of experience led me in a slightly different direction, I learned a lot in, quite frankly, a lot of fields...one of which happened to be buying at flea markets.

If you live in Colorado, one such gathering towers over the rest: The Mile High Flea Market at Denver. Obviously, I had to go check it out. The excuse was, of course, to shop for pennies-on-the-dollar bargains to sell on eBay. However, I freely admit I was definitely looking forward to the experience.

That place really is big, but I strolled its streets (yup, it has STREETS) on a fairly quiet day and was able to take a quick look at pretty much everything in about four hours. By the time I was done, I'd spent a few dollars (under $50) and had my Subaru Outback bulging with salable merchandise.

The question was, though, just how valuable was it?

There were several of my purchases we found of interest, including a mixed batch of silver tea sets. Some were sterling, some silver plate. Some sets were complete, some short a piece or two. Those, fortunately, we found we could check out pretty quickly by simply searching for similar items on eBay. It turned out there were auctions we could use to compare.

Since I had spent about $20 for an accumulation of silver worth roughly $75 at "average" eBay auction prices, we were okay there. Not getting rich on an all day, 450-mile round trip, but at least not losing the whole farm. Ho hum. At least we knew.

Our greatest curiosity, though, involved five pieces of cobalt blue antique glass. These bottles were stunningly beautiful, and we knew that an entire group of collectors focus on this blue glass. I'd only paid a buck a bottle (yup, $1 per), but...just what did we have?

The two smallest bottles, pictured in the photo above, were easy. eBay had some auctions going on that identified them: They are poison bottles from the late 1800's...and they do have some collectible value, but not enough to pay off the mortgage. Again ho, and even hum. Could not get rich, so we decided to keep them for now. On a shelf. In the living room.

But the most beautiful bottle was a 12-ounce flask with a flag-chested eagle embossed on the front and a cornucopia on the back. Here, we thought, we might have something truly valuable. How to find out?

A single Google Search pulled up the answer: Historic Glasshouse, owned and operated by a man who knows more about antique glass bottles than I know about my six ex-wives. For $9.95, he did a formal appraisal. We had done well, but only well enough to feature a photo of the bottle on our website, not to make a ton of money selling it.

The money was well spent, sort of a good news, bad news thing. The good news was: Our flask was worth around $40, not bad for a $1 investment. The bad news was: It was not quite from the right era, but a more modern reproduction. Turns out that type of flask was never done in cobalt blue during the right time period. The really bad news? If it HAD been from that era, it's value would have been in the $50,000 range.

Ah well. So much for greed. At least it remains with us, a beautiful addition to our home, and helped provide our simple guidelines for checking out flea market super-bargains:

1. Run an eBay search for similar items, which will identify and comparison-price 75% of all your "stuff".

2. If the remaining items MIGHT be really valuable, contact an appraiser.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32