Back in 1996, I wrote a thread for the old AOL Lighthouse Collectibles Board suggesting which specific Harbour Lights a collector should purchase and in what order.

(Does anyone happen to have that original thread saved?)

The suggestions were based on which lighthouses were actually then available at retail prices and their relative scarcity. I believe I tried to factor in my 'dispersion theory'.

(Dispersion theory: "How many collectors hold extras of a given piece.")

Assuming you are in the market for any and all HL Limited Editions, what advice would you give a serious collector today?

Jakers' Sherwood Point WI with an edition size of only 3,500 might be a good candidate. I doubt there are many collector-speculators who have a half-dozen of these stashed in a closet. And Mombo's Sister Island with an edition size of 4,000 is probably not held by speculators either.

This as opposed to the speculation of the Panama Matched Set and the 5th Order Fresnel (both 4,000 editions) that went on when those two pieces first were introduced.

What's your advice? Remember, we're talking about pieces probably still available at retail.

We may have lost our copies of that thread from the FSB archives, recently a guy showed up at the door from the IRS and Tim asked me to get him some coffee and cookies while he stoked up the fireplace with boxes of old records, Tim thinks he got 6-7 boxes in the fireplace before we found out that he was just out ice fishing and was looking for a bait shop and thought the FSB was a bait shop because of the 12' wooden walleye Tim has over the driveway arch. Anyway it was just a false alarm, but we thought it was good practice under simulated conditions.