eBay is by far the largest selling venue for Cybis porcelains, with more than 1000 listings active on any given day, but the range of approaches taken by sellers is as wide as the Grand Canyon. An epically-awkward listing recently appeared and prompted me to create this post as a small tutorial showing the Good, [...]
This is an expansion of/addendum to my July 2021 post explaining the nine different reasons that a piece of Cybis porcelain might have been marked AP (which most people would assume means ‘artist proof’ but – as that Archive post explains – on Cybis pieces it probably does not actually mean that.) I am often [...]
After the closure of the studio, the so-called ‘secondary’ market became the only way to buy Cybis porcelains. Truth be told, the majority of pieces have been sold that way for the past two decades; even when the studio had a website, their prices were so much higher than anyone else’s that their percentage of [...]
January 2023 update: If you are looking for actual numbers to determine the current market value of a limited-edition Cybis, the Recent Selling Prices page will be more helpful to you. However, if you are trying to determine the value of a non-limited piece, the post you are now reading may give you the insight [...]
From a collector’s point of view, the issue size of a limited-edition item is of major importance; it’s therefore disconcerting if the artist or manufacturer plays fast and loose with that particular attribute. The concept of marketing retail items as “limited editions” didn’t become widespread until the 1960s. The Boehm Porcelain studio was one of [...]
Way way back in the Dark Ages B.E. (Before eBay), there were only two avenues for selling a piece of Cybis porcelain if you weren’t a retailer who was part of the Cybis Studio’s dealer network: You either placed an advertisement in the classified-ads section of a newspaper, or if you had a working relationship [...]
I have received many inquiries from people asking for advice on pricing or valuing a piece of Cybis that they have received or wish to sell, and they sometimes asked why there is no indication of the actual current market value in my description of each piece in the Archive. For several years, the simple [...]
You might see any of the following words used to describe Cybis pieces: Open, Completed, Retired, Special Edition, Event Piece, Limited Edition, Special Commission, Gift of State, or Artist’s Proof. What do they all mean? OPEN EDITION (a/k/a non-limited edition): An Open edition was introduced and then continued to be produced until Cybis decided to [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 