People ask why everything we sell comes from one country. The short answer is that Japan kept its things.
Why Japan
There’s a habit there of servicing what you own, keeping the box and the papers, and storing a camera the way you’d store a good knife. So the vintage market runs deep and clean. Cameras, lenses, watches, pens, and audio that were used well and looked after for decades come up all the time. For the kind of thing we sell, there’s nowhere better to look.
What we look for
Not the rarest thing, and not the cheapest. We look for pieces that were cared for: even wear in the places a hand finds first, no sign of a forced repair, a finish and a serial number that agree with each other. A piece also has to be worth owning at the price we’d put on it. If it isn’t, we leave it.
The bench
What we buy comes to California, where it’s tested, serviced, and graded before it earns a listing. That part isn’t optional. A piece that came a long way still has to tell the truth about its condition, and a lot of what we do is making sure it can.
That’s most of what the shop is, really: buying what we’d keep ourselves, writing down what we found, and putting a price on it that we would pay.