It’s been almost five years since I started tearing up old books and magazines and selling their separate pages on eBay, and I made a pretty good profit! In fact, those separate pages can fetch much higher prices than you would selling the entire book on eBay, for reasons I’ll tell you about now.

The main reason is that there are many buyers, on eBay and elsewhere, for pictures or articles, maps or drawings, how-to guides and advertisements, and many other products from old books and magazines. Some articles are for research purposes, some are just for reading, some are for decorative purposes which, framed or unframed, look much better than any poster or print today.

We are talking about very early publications here, not recent ones, the most profitable of all are highly illustrated books and magazines from the Victorian era which can be quite rare today and their contents are worth a premium over modern publications.

Advertisements, for example, were often created by highly collectible artists and printed on thick paper, as opposed to their thinner paper modern photographic counterparts available in the hundreds or thousands. Because magazines in particular were, and still are, created to be read and usually thrown away soon after, it is unlikely that many from the Victorian era remain in good condition today. Post pages that have survived the years unscathed can fetch high prices on eBay, sometimes much more than the book they came from, mainly because few end users know how or where to find those original posts containing their particular favorite pages. Therefore, they will pay high prices to buy individual pages instead of spending hours or days, weeks or even years locating their original posts.

That makes this idea one of the best and most profitable arbitrage opportunities available today, especially for buyers at book auctions and boot sales, also on eBay, who are looking for books containing highly collectible pages to pick up and resell online. eBay.

A major benefit of this business is that the most popular items from vintage books and magazines can attract double or higher numbers of bidders and culminate in abundant second chance offers for every eBay listing. So once you know which titles to look for—that is, those that command the highest prices per page on eBay—all you have to do is search on and off the internet and restock your stock as often as possible.

These tips will help you grow a stock of books and magazines to literally tear apart and sell their pages on eBay:

* Look at other sellers’ high price lists for items pulled from early books and magazines and take note of titles mentioned by sellers that you’ll later add to your ‘wanted’ lists with online and offline booksellers. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t give product sources in your own listings for fear of passing on your secrets and sharing your marketplace with other sellers.

* If sellers give print or page titles or even dates and artist names, but not actual publication titles, try searching Google images for those pages. For a print of George Studdy, for example, creator of Bonzo Dog, and a print titled ‘Ball Boy’, you can google images for ‘Studdy + Bonzo + Ball + Boy’ where you will almost certainly discover that the print was published. in several different publications that you can then search through online auction databases or add to your ‘wanted’ lists with online and offline book sellers.

Those are just two tips, but very important ones, and they will help you grow a stock of posts that you can buy for a few dollars each and break them down into ten, twenty, or many more pages, all potentially worth at least as much as the book or magazine from which they come.