marketplace

Early in July I was teaching and performing at a festival in Colorado Springs. Despite having grown bored with eBay ads for string instruments, I had some time to kill and went perusing eBay to see what was on offer. Among all the usual motley collection of items, was an ad for a violin bow:

Such an ad wouldn’t have attracted my attention, but for the fact that the $15,000.00 starting bid named was real money (suggesting that the item might have real value?) and the area code was an indication that the bow might be viewable in the same region as Colorado Springs. I was at the end of my stay in Colorado, and with my last free afternoon there I decided to go and have a look at the bow. I called the number, made an appointment, and with my 9-year-old son Alexander in tow trundled off to Pueblo, Colorado, a sixty-minute drive from Colorado Springs.

The drive from Colorado Springs to Pueblo takes one down more than a thousand feet, from 6200 feet above sea level in the foothills of Pikes Peak, to the arid desert below. The thermometer in the rental car registered 105 degrees as we drove on dusty highway 25 toward our destination. It was not a scenic drive. I followed the instructions given by the man on the other end of the phone, and we eventually arrived at a dirt road next to railroad tracks in an unincorporated section of Pueblo near the Pueblo airport.

Proceeding the dirt path, we eventually arrived at a squalid little house set back from the road. Waiting for us at the front door was a grizzled, elderly man with a long beard who greeted us congenially. Inside, the house was untidy and run-down. An elderly woman, and a boy about Alexander’s age, watching cartoons on TV with headphones paid us little heed. Sitting on a sofa was an open double case with two violins and three bows in it and letter alongside. It took me all of 10 seconds to determine that there was nothing of substantive value here: A German violin bow spuriously branded “W.E. Hill and Sons,” a bow branded “Prell,” and an extremely worn, nondescript bow with no brand visible, which was the so-called Tourte. Similarly, the violins were simple factory instruments in poor condition, more or less without value at all. There was a letter, dated 1955, from someone unknown in the violin trade, suggesting that a bow was a Tourte, but there was no way to connect the letter to the items in the double case. No Hill appraisal document was in evidence.

I thanked the seller for his time and gathered Alexander to head back outside. As we approached the car Alexander said, “Dad, I didn’t like that place.” I replied that it wasn’t a very nice place. Then Alexander asked about the bow. I told him it was nothing and observed as Alexander privately wondered what we were doing in Pueblo, Colorado, in 105-degree heat? “Welcome to the fiddle business.” I told him. The next stop was the Ice Cream Shop in Colorado Springs!

This story typifies the wholesale string instrument business in general and the eBay experience in particular. eBay can frequently serve as a sort of fools gold for buyers and sellers alike. Naïve sellers imagine that they have precious riches and a ready buyer can be found easily on eBay. Greed-driven buyers imagine that they will find some steal on which they can profiteer. There is now a whole category of people who make a living instructing inexperienced buyers and sellers on how to profit using eBay. In fact it is nearly always, as in the story above, a waste of time, energy, and perhaps even money for all the parties. ###
Stefan Hersh

Stefan Hersh is a violinist who teaches at The Chicago School of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University