How rare is it to find an anime script from the late 1990s for purchase?

Question

I'm interested in buying official Japanese-language anime scripts from Japanese online auctions, Japanese online shops, eBay, and/or American websites. How often are they listed? If I see one, do I need to act immediately because the chance of coming across it again is extremely low? If it's not my favorite episode of the series, should I hold out and wait because other episodes' scripts will likely go up for auction at some point (say, within this year)? Or is it more likely that the one I see is the only one I'm going to be able to get my hands on?

I'm particularly interested in Sailor Moon scripts which date from the late 1990s. How many copies of these were printed?

Answer 1

Since I posted the question half a year ago, I've been tracking Sailor Moon scripts on Yahoo! Japan Auctions more regularly. If you are looking for a script of a specific episode, you should act when it becomes available, because there are always some scripts up for sale, but not scripts of most of the episodes of such a long series. At a given time, about 10~30 episode scripts are on auction. Scripts from the Sailor Stars season (season 5) rarely go up on auction (I've only seen 2 listed in the past year). The Japanese used (i.e. pre-owned) merchandise store called Mandarake (online shop, plus branches in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, etc.) sells scripts from a variety of series.