The doctoring of cards seems to be the natural progression when the commerce side of things has deemed this series too valueable for the hoi polloi.
Not that purists don't remain, nor to say that scholarship hasn't grown since T206 became the province of the wealthy, because both have invariably happened. But isn't it the least bit ironic that Jefferson Burdick, who first gave the set its name and parameters, and got this whole hobby rolling, would today not be able to afford the very Wagner that he hoisted up as the hobby's great scarcity, given his modest income?
Michael O'Keefe and Teri Thompson's book The Card hit the nail on the head, and while we look at guys like Bill Maestro as the villains and the Rob Lifsons as the heroes, the truth is, what they have done with the vintage card market has permeated the entire market of cards, so that now even newly-produced baseball cards are out of the reaches of kids, and like Orson Welles pointed out about the fine art world in his film F for Fake (1975), holds true for us in the basball card world, as we no longer have access to the truth about our cardboard's history. It has been clouded by two slabs of plastic and a nefarious price mark-up. I'm sure many don't care, and others would call me a commie or ludite, but so be it.
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