What is Rare

Chris Gower

What do we call Rare? As a collector of Handcuffs and Restraints my other interest is coin collecting. In the coin collecting community we have a scale from very common to R15 which indicates an extremely rare or possibly unique coin. Generally the rarer the item the more valuable it is. However, regarding handcuffs there are many rare, unique or hard to obtain items. The rarity does not always reflect on their value. I have two examples here both from
Germany. The first is made by Bonowi and has a unique key with 3 cuts, the second is a Deutsche Polizei handcuff that has a 3 lever mechanism. These are both rare for collectors to
add to their collection as they are restricted for sale to authorised police and prison departments. What are you thoughts on rarity?

Richard Phillips

Perhaps ‘rare’ needs revising in view of the numbers of items previously thought to be rare now appearing, because it is easy to see a worldwide market of sellers all over the world on a few major web auction sites.
Many sellers optimistically labels itemsas rare, even antique, which are neither. Not sure whether this is ignorance, or fraud.

KitBear

Rarity is based on scarcity, obtainability, production volume, remaining volume, age, uniqueness and condition. You might have an item that was made in the millions but if only 5 exist that are in brand new condition then it becomes rare and scarce.

There’s too many variables to take into consideration.

Doug MacQueen

Rarity like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What I mean here is what exactly is your sphere of knowledge regarding a certain item. Being in the lock and safe trade for 50 years now gives me an idea on the rarity of many U.S. made antique safe locks and time locks. However I am not a collector so my opinion of an item may not match up with hard core collectors. As an example in the book American Genius, John Erroll often gives estimates on the known number of certain locks in existence. More often than not that number is much higher than I would have guessed. But then on the other hand there are some cases where I know of many more examples than he has listed.