My friend Dan proposed the following in a recent email to me.

Someone should start a lens co-op. There are, blessedly, so many kids getting back into real photography now that DSLRs are inexpensive, but few of them want to drop $3,000 on a nice bag of lenses. Just like a car co-op, a lens co-op could pool lenses (likely Canon and Nikon only, or maybe only one brand if it was tied to one of these brand-loyal communities) and grant access for a small fee. It would work well especially with semi-serious photogs, because we tend to own specialized lenses that we don't use all that often.

When I had my D1H, I also had a 24/2.8 (the normal lens, even though I didn't like it that much), an 85/1.8 (far and away my favourite, although useless for anything but portraiture, basketball and concerts) and a 300/4 (even less useful most of the time, but matchless once a month when I felt like shooting a football game or stalking rabbits in the river valley).

The point is that I wouldn't have minded the 300/4 being out with the co-op most of the time, because I needed it only very rarely, but I still couldn't do without it. You can't shoot a football game with an 85/1.8. It's a waste for that lens to sit around the rest of the time, though -- and man but I would have loved to borrow someone else's 14/2.8 on occasions. This would work better with lenses like the 14/2.8 and 300/4, because you can get working-but-ugly copies of them for $400. Something like an 80-200/2.8, however, is both so expensive and so universally useful that no one's going to want to let go of it, which is why you restrict yourself to the toy lenses.

Long-winded explanation, but that's just Dan. My question is... does anything like this exist? And do you think it would fly?