[drcy]

Many years ago, no one on this board would have known what a wirephoto literally meant or knew anything about the stamps or the paper caption tags, and I did the research on my own, wrote articles on the subjects and issued a booklet about it. I had to do the homework and research on my own, because there was no one in the hobby who know it, much less would tell me it.

This was numerous years before the Portrait of Baseball came out. And this is why I get piturbed when the resident PSA/DNA jock sniffers hold up that book as the original hobby source for all that information. Portrait of Baseball is a good book, has new information and research, and I recommended it. But it didn't invent the information and certainly didn't credit me or my earlier publications or original research.

But my main point is a collector often has to find the information on his own. Others in the hobby and on chat boards simply don't know, and it will be that collector who introduces it to the hobby.

And, yes, I said resident PSA/DNA jock sniffers. I can be funny yet biting, even on a Monday morning.

And when readers read my book on what to look under a microscope for on early baseball cards, I researched and came up with that information on my own. I did research on fine art and ancient printing in general, then applied it to baseball cards. It may be commonplace now, but I bet no baseball card collector or grader owned a 100X microscope before I came out with my book.

And, if one doesn't already deduce it from my post, I'm very competitive.