Posted By:
MW<< My major problem with it is the authors tie lack of interest in shiny, new stuff to the vintage card market as well when they are two entirely different animals. Vintage cards certainly seem to be in a robust pricing stage right now, wouldn't you say? >>
Dave,
I found O'Keeffe's attempt to link vintage and modern cards to be similarly confusing and I don't think it was a particularly erudite association to make. Sure, there are some who collect both (vintage and modern) but to make the claim that Fleer's 2005 bankruptcy or Wal-Mart's inability to sell boxes of shiny new stuff signals the death knell of the vintage market demonstrates, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of the hobby. O'Keeffe's contention that "[t]he hobby peaked in 1991...but it has been in free fall ever since" isn't very accurate.
There was also an interesting irony in the book. In several places, O'Keeffe mentions that there is a secret "before photo" of the T206 Wagner and yet he was never able to get his hands on it and include it in his book. But even if he had, would it have made a difference? Think about the following -- if someone cannot tell the difference between the blatantly fake T206 Honus Wagner owned by Ray Edwards and John Cobb and an authentic example of the same card, then how is that person going to make any accurate and objective judgments from an old, fuzzy photo?
This, for me, became the most enduring theme in the book. An investigative journalist, who for all his research, was unable to determine that two scalawags from Cincinnati were trying to defraud the hobby to the tune of $1 million, was going to "blow the cover" off the hobby with his exhaustive research into the history of the hobby's most famous baseball card.
Does anyone else see the problem with that picture?
05-28-2007, 01:16 AM
My take on Michael O'Keeffe's book, "The Card"
Similar Threads
Threaded Mode