If I had put two and two together, I would have known something was up with Stu Reisbord and his animation drawings from the time I first knew that he had some. At the 1984 con, I had bought several drawings of my favorite Disney character, the Robber Kitten, all of which came from different, previously unavailable scenes. I later remembered that the year before, when I had talked to Russ Cochran about his plan to officially sell Disney drawings, I had asked if he could get drawings of the Robber Kitten. He asked me in response what I would think of a whole notebook of drawings from a number of scenes which would tell the entire story from the cartoon. I said that that would be wonderful, but nothing ever came of it. After the summer of 1984, drawings from The Robber Kitten continued to turn up, while drawings from other Silly Symphonies from multiple scenes did not appear in anywhere near such numbers. I surmised that Cochran or his people had actually pulled out scenes to make a Robber Kitten notebook, as had been discussed, but Cochran's project never went far enough to get around to assembling and selling any actual notebooks. When Stu's person was gathering up drawings, I assume that she just scooped up the Robber Kitten scenes along with everything else. Stu must have wondered why on Earth she would take drawings from such an obscure Silly Symphony!
While I would never characterize the method by which Stu Reisbord built his fabulous investory of Disney drawings as clever or smart, I do give him credit for the brilliant ways in which he marketed the hundreds of thousands of drawings once he got them. First, he did not flood the market, which would have really decreased their value, but sold them slowly for over a decade. He rarely sold complete scenes, at least in the beginning, but would select drawings from a number scenes, including some great ones and some mediocre ones, and sell them in packets of fixed prices to dealers all over the country. A dealer had no choice in the selections but could only send in their $25,000 or $50,000 and take what they got. No wonder Stu had been so disgusted that he couldn't even get $11,000 out of me after San Diego that year. By ensuring that he got rid of the low end drawings along with the higher end examples, and by doling out drawings from different scenes to dealers all over the world, no one was suspicious that so many drawings were available. The dealers also didn't become angry, as they would have if many of their competitors had very similar drawings for sale as they themselves had.
Perhaps the smartest thing that Stu did was to initially take the very best drawings from any scene and consign those to animation auctions before releasing others from the scene to retail dealers. As a result of great drawings first being bid up at auctions by excited collectors, the high prices they sold for helped develop the market for similar, albeit a little less great, drawings, that other animation dealers would later be selling. And Stu didn't limit himself to domestic auctions. I was very well aware that Sotheby's in London started offering Disney drawings in their book illustration sales which were not only of very high quality but were from entirely different scenes than the drawings which were showing up in American auctions -- rare characters such as Dumbo and Bacchus with Jackass could only be found in London auctions, even though those auctions had never before included anything of much significance in the way of Disney art. Only one or a very few drawings from a few scenes would be auctioned or included in dealer packages, even over the course of many years. Toward the end of Stu's life, my San Fernando Valley animation art dealer friend bought a few nearly intact scenes from Stu. Included were some of the scenes from which a single drawing had been auctioned years earlier at Sotheby's in London. And, even at that late date (in the early 2000s), Stu was still selling scenes which were totally intact, including some great drawings from Mickey's Circus and a complete scene of top notch drawings of Chernabog. Continued...
