Posted By:
brian pTo get back to the original topic, I personally believe the Mastro auction descriptions have improved over the past few years. Sure a gestaltic aesthetic might be tough to top, but just about every lot in their earlier catalogs made me laugh--they were so over the top and schmaltzy and ridiculously convulted. I pulled a random catalog from 2000, the November auction, and picked out a card lot (a complete set of E93 cards)that typifies this 'breeziness'. Mind you, there is some interesting observations included in the description, but they sure get a little lost in all the word puffery. Here is a portion of it:
"...another riddle muddies our understanding of the era. The vast majority of cards surviving from that period were tobacco sponsored, which serviced most collectors, youngsters, indirectly. Baseball cards dispensed with candy products would seem the most fluid route to the first-hand consumer. However, extant numbers of these so-called caramel cards are undeniable evidence that the candy industry paled dismally as compared to tobacco. Because these cards, both candy and tobacco, were not sold, but rather served as sales stimulants, the two industries were not competitive belligerants. As hobbyists, we passively regard the scarcity of early candy cards as moot, and the only plausible explanation rests with product networking of the respective industries. And that of the candy was evidently primitive. The E93 set offered here fairly typifies that group of issues. Brief in its variety of subjects, dimensionally similiar to its tobacco card contemporaries, and featuring most of the stars of the day, E93's are the consummate pattern of the genre. In general terms, caramel cards of this ilk entered our hobby as isolated matters of insignificance with large collections of tobacco cards. And now that we're gratified by order and understanding in our collecting pursuits, issues such as E93 have beckoned more intense interest. Because caramel cards were distributed so sparsely, collectors today must generally accept them in conditions less exacting than tobacco cards. The E93 set offered here, though punctuated with typically off-condition cards, is nevertheless one of overall superior quality, and as such we care to itemize the entire set by condition."
Good Lord. And there are dozens of lot desciptions of this ilk from the aforementioned catalog alone that are probably even more egregious in nature, rendering the actual items in the lot moot amidst the pale wash of wordy insignificance and wonton explanatory indiscretions (just thought I would try this style on for size--humm, I think it suits me just fine. Maybe Mastro could use a catalog writer that can help return them to their glorious past).
Brian