Posted By:
david PosesI just finished reading "The Card." I know the information contained therein is extremely touchy. I've followed all the threads on the board and never contributed my own opinion, but for a long time, I've had a tough time believing that a small piece of cardboard, which was by all accounts worthless when it appeared 100 years ago, managed to survive so well when important family heirlooms (photos, letters, army cards, report cards post cards, whatever. PAPER), that DID have value (not monetary value, but value nevertheless) withered, while stored in presumably the same vessels these (at the time "worthless") (now valuable) "blazer" cards were stored in.
The more I think about it, the harder it is for me to fathom that anything from 1909 can look as good as so many baseball cards look. Before grading, I hardly ever encountered such pristine examples of so many of the cards I see today. I do not claim to be an expert, but as a litmus test, I assume that the pristine T206s that survived were put in the same storage vessel as the T210s and anything else somebody decided to save back then. Fine, there weren't any stars in the t210 set, and the postcard my grandfather sent to my grandmother in 1924 has no value on the open market, but that doesn't mean either were stored in a lesser-quality shoebox with a mechanism that chips paper off of corners, etc.
My question is this: What is the retort to the “mass restoration conspiracy” argument? Does anyone know anybody who is related to the person who pulled a PSA 10 out of the book/box where it hid for 90 years?
As someone who rarely posts, i’d hate to come off as “the guy nobody knows who shows up and unloads this crazy crap.” But as a curious person relatively new to the hobby, its a dialogue I’m interesting in having.
None of this changes the focus of my collection or my want to expand it. The last thing I want to do is make waves. I love this hobby and while in any hobby there will always be a rift between the purists and the investors, I just want to understand, or hear some evidence which indicates that the entire high-end market is not full of s**t.