C5

By The Associated Press

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

LOS ANGELES - Everybody is a collector, the way Joe Maddalena sees it, just not everybody wants to collect paintings by Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein. Some would prefer to own a Spider-Man costume.

"It's the same exact thing as collecting contemporary art," Maddalena says of buying and selling pop culture artifacts like one of the outfits Tobey Maguire wore in the Spider-Man movies or the gun Clint Eastwood toted in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

"Pop culture has become the thing to collect, whether it's contemporary art or pop art," continues Maddalena, who has been in the business of buying and selling artifacts for 22 years.

"And now that art has started to transfer over to film and television."

As a result, on Thursday and Friday he'll have one of his largest sales yet, putting some 1,100 items on the auction block. They range from sought-after pieces such as a miniature fighter ship from the first Star Wars movie that he expects will fetch more than $100,000 to the Bat Radio that Adam West used in the campy 1960s TV show Batman (estimated to bring $8,000 to $12,000).

Particularly big this year, Maddalena said as he prepared for the auction this week, are superhero costumes. He's not only got one worn by Maguire in Spider-Man, but also another worn by Ben Affleck in Daredevil and still others worn by Ian McKellen (as Magneto) and Anna Paquin (as Rogue) in X-Men.

And to think that Maddalena began his company, Profiles in History, as a historical documents dealership, selling things such as letters from Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.