[JimStinson]

Interesting thread here and I like it , I was away for the weekend and was not going to post much because I too felt that there started to involve negative issues and comments , There were a couple of times that even my own attempts at levity in hindsight seemed ill mannered and ill timed.
The best thing I can add to this thread is what the late George Sanders said to me once. George and Helen used to put out all the autograph price guides and he had been a celebrity in his own right having his own radio show and had personally met and interviewed and gotten the autographs of Dr. Martin Luther King, JFK, everyone that was anyone in the 1950's and 1960's. I would usually write the introduction on Baseball autographs for his books. I was also doing free lance writing on sports in general and autographs in particular and he told me this

"People will want to hear about the NEGATIVE side of collecting, Don;t give it to them. If you can't write anything good about the hobby don't write NOTHING at all because There is MORE than enough good to go around and if you wrote from now until you couldn;t write anymore about NOTHING but the positive experiences you've had in autograph collecting you STILL would not have time to write about all of it"