Quote:
Originally Posted by raulus
Curious whether your other hobby has the same population of stuff floating around, and whether it has the same volume of ownership churn.
That level of provenance seems like it would be possible with a smaller universe of stuff that didn't change hands very often, particularly if the universe of stuff stopped being produced 100 years ago, so there is a finite (and even shrinking) overall population.
But with our population of stuff, trying to organize such a task outside of really special stuff, like the T206 Wagner, seems like a task for some combination of Hercules and Sisyphus. Plus it's hard to imagine how anyone could ever hope to get compensated for tracking all of it.
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For the common items yes, sometimes a decent churn. Collections get made and sold and broken up pretty regularly. Nobody tracks those.
The number of unique items is probably higher.
On those, the churn is almost not there on many items. Serious collectors pretty much buy and hold the very best things.
A lot of that is competitive displays where you explain and show off those great items. All to win a prize that's fairly small compared to the cost of creating a top quality display.
I own an item that I wrote an article about in 2012. The last time it was described in any article was 1932.
I also have an item that was probably last auctioned in the 1930's and turned up a few years ago on ebay.
Neither was pictured in an article, since it was illegal in the 30's to show actual pictures of US stamps.
I've also seen some pretty big ticket items get passed around with some regularity.
One of the major auction houses does track a number of items on a census page.
https://resources.siegelauctions.com/census.php
It's worth it to the auction house to be able to say if a particular example is typical or one of the better copies available. And just how many are known.
That can be done with searching the big expertizing company databases, but having the pictures all laid out is much easier. And would be very valuable if my time was worth a lot.
The 36WWG DiMaggio has about 50 copies between SGC and PSA, that's right in the range of some stuff in Siegels census. And if I recall it right there are about that many Wagners in T206 resources gallery.
The provenance from major collections is sort of handled differently. And usually applies to the rarest things. Al though some rarities were marked by their owners, a typical thing over a century ago. And if the collector is a big enough celebrity even the common things get at least a not saying whose collection it came from. I have a couple christmas seal proofs that are a sub $20 item even if they were once owned by FDR.
01-28-2025, 12:17 PM
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