[thecatspajamas]

I absolutely HATE the way these "cut-outs" are being produced and marketed as standalone collectibles. I'm sick of them coming up in my eBay searches, and I am disgusted by the wanton destruction a few individuals are wrecking on these old guides.

If you could guarantee that every one of these things came from a guide that was already falling apart and incomplete, I might feel differently, but that's not the case. To a man, if you ask the regular sellers of these things why they are carving up 100-year-old books, they will tell you they were already damaged, coming apart, etc. But you can look at their buying history, and clearly see that is not the case. Allowing and encouraging the selling of these individual pages is tantamount to allowing and encouraging the destruction of the guides. If a few sales of pages that legitimately fell out of a deteriorating guide are blocked, that is a small price to pay in my opinion.

Heaven help the Reach and Spalding guides if any of the major TPG's start grading these things. We'll have knuckleheads with exacto knives falling over each other to see who can cut the straightest line, and these guides will go the way of the dodo.