Last week I was at my Scout office for a meeting and stopped by the trading post. They have the new boy rank patches out commerating the 100th anniversary year of the BSA. I think these are neat but the quality control is poor. There are at least three major varieties in this group alone. Some appear to have been made by the BSA. Others have ‘Made in China’ stickers on the back. The latter is a separate sore point but we’ll leave that for another blog. Anyway, variety collectors are going to have a field day figuring these out. I’m told there’s an Eagle patch as well but I’ve not seen it. I’ve also been told that Scout shops are to have returned their inventory of the regular items so as to be replaced with these 2010 pieces.

Then Destry and I went to the Indy TOR this past weekend. Their hospitality was great as always (except for the 9″ of snow.) Several councils now have out 2010 patches. That got me asking around how many items do you think we’ll have for the 100th anniversary? By “items” I mean regular issue pieces – CSPs, JSPs, OA items. I’m figuring it will be up to 5,000. Could be more. And this is not counting camp and camporee items or Jamboree staff items. One could spend a lifetime just to collect this year. Also, I was hearing quotes for “rare, limited edition” varieties at huge prices. Councils and lodges could kill a good thing. If you know of some egregious abuses, please pass on the comment. Thanks.

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Sort of in a punchy mood from sleep deprivation and patch overload. Just received several consignments of all different types of items. Now we measure them by the hand truck load. We’ll have items on our preview page but I’m blogging here first because even for us this will take a day or two to work up. Collectors, and non-collectors, often ask where we get so many different patches. And that is part of the answer. We’ve been the largest dealer of Scouting memorabilia for nearly two decades. At TORs other dealers come to us for information and pricing data. We ‘pay for ourselves’ because we know what we’re looking at, how to describe it and who might be interested in it. Also, having our own office, warehouse, and all that goes with it (such as full dealer insurance covering consignments), we like to think we’re the place to handle significant Boy Scout collections.

New Scout Patch Auction consignments

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