Coop sent this story link to me a while back, describing it as “an excellent first-person account [by Chuck Rozanski] of the discovery of the ‘Mile High’ collection, the Holy Grail of comics collecting. This is the kind of thing that craphounds have wet dreams about.”
I worked at Mile High Comics in Boulder, Colorado from about age 12 to 17. I was working there when Chuck Rozanski bought what is widely regarded as the most valuable cache of Golden Age comics on the planet. I was too young and dumb to realize how monumental this find was. I just remember Chuck fretting about how he was going to come up with the tiny amount of money he’d need to pay for the collection that was worth millions.
It’s an amazing story.
Believe it or not, what was going through my mind as I was looking at the closet was fear. Not just a fear that the deal would get screwed up somehow, but also a realization that my life was about to radically change. It’s one thing to have slowly built up a small business over a period of many years, and quite another to suddenly win the lottery. I could see very clearly that discovering this collection was going to completely change my life, and that nothing would ever again be the same. I was excited at that prospect, but also very trepidatious. Radical change can be good, but it can also destroy much of that which you hold most dear.
