Restored cards.....your thoughts

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Posted By: Hankron

For large display items, like movie posters and even advertising signs, the desire for restoration is understandable. If you have a well kept home, it's understandable that you would want that giant movie poster in your livingroom to not look like charred remains from a sunken pirate ship. Also, for many antique prints restoration is important to preserve the print. Left unchecked, the thin paper will often be destroyed by time.

Even with these types of prints and posters, a natural Mint poster will always be worth much more than a restored to Mint poster. So, in the movie poster and fine art hobbies, the collectors and dealears are conscious of and checking for alterations and restorations. Trimming to an original Salvador Dali print is considered to be bad just as a trimmed 1958 Topps Willie Mays is considered to be bad.

As already noted, baseball card collectors are unually adverse to restoration. And there's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. Firstly, unlike movie posters, trading cards are not display pieces, and are kept often literally in boxes in closets. The average Babe Ruth Goudey is taken out and looked at once in a while, not displayed behind the dinning room table for everyone to view while eating. As they're usually printed on heavy cardstock, preservation is not a big deal. Since they are so small and condition sensitive, any alteration, even small, is considered to be a momentous situtation, as opposed to a 4 foot by 5 foot poster. In the hobby, 99.99 percent of restorations are a part of fraud: trimming, bleaching, 'Magee' to Magie', etc in order to cheat someone out of money. So it is understandable that the whole idea of altering a card's appearance leaves a bad taste.

Whether or not one considers restoration desirable or undesirable, the one rule that flows through all areas of colletiong-- toy trains to Rembrant paintings, antique furnature to stamps-- is that restoration has to be be specifically reported to the potential buyer, and that not reporting it is unethical and possibly fraud.