I was tempted about a month ago on eBay to bid on a Frog 1/72 Martin Maryland kit - I won, and the kit was delivered safely and quickly to my door. I guess I bid on the kit because it was a plane I knew next to nothing about - had hardly heard of it, in fact - and being a lesser-known plane it caught my interest. Knowing nothing about it also meant that I'd have to do a good amount of research on it in order to do a decent job on the kit, when it came time. So I searched for and found a Profile (#232) for the Martin Baltimore/Maryland, and bid on it. Well, the bidding escalated more than I was used to seeing for a single Profile, but I had just gotten a nice fat refund check so I went with it. I figured 7 or 8 dollars is usually more than enough to outbid anyone else for a single volume, but not this time. So then I figured I'd go all-out and bid so far over the head of the highest bidder that there was no way I could lose, and I figured that in addition I most likely wouldn't pay nearly the amount I bid - so I bid $17 with a minute left to go. Well, someone must have wanted that Profile very badly, because that $17 bid wasn't even high enough. The high bid at the end was just shy of $18.
A week later I saw another copy of the same Profile, so I bid on that one. Again the bidding escalated, and with a day left it was up to $11. So this time I bid $18, thinking the last time was a fluke. Nope. The winning bid this time was $18.50.
Does anyone have any idea why these Baltimore/Maryland profiles go for so high a price? By no means am I trying to collect the entire series, but I try to get a Profile for every plane I have an interest in, or in this case, that I have a kit of and don't know enough about from the reference materials I already have. Are the later issues (#200 or above) harder to come by? Or is it just my dumb luck?