Quote:
Originally Posted by ASF123
Well that doesn't help me much  . |
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be condescending or anything with that response. I just think it's true. If you've handled a considerable amount of vintage cards, that's way better preparation to spot fakes and reprints in person than spending 10x that amount of time looking at real vintage cards online. There is a certain texture to them, and even a certain smell. 1950's cards are different from prewar cards, and 1970's cards are different from 1950's cards. In many cases with fakes, the gloss and color on the surface of the cards can be way off, and if you've spent a lot of time flipping through stacks of mid or lower grade commons from the era in question, you are going to notice that kid of thing in a couple of seconds. Another thing that's much easier to see in person with older cards is the halftone dots that make up the pictures, from the printing process of the day. If you compare that in many cases to reprints or modern cards, you will see that they don't have this.
These kinds of things are what I mean. Of course it's more difficult now, when I grew up collecting you could walk into any one of about 3 or 4 cards shops locally and handle vintage cards. These days you would probably have to start by buying some of them online.
Since we are talking about the '65 Mantle - some things I would look for with fakes there is the white borders being too white, the card overall being too glossy, and that magenta / pink inner border at the bottom. Legit copies of this card can have some variation with how bright this pink is, but based on how it was printed - a fake or reprint is almost always going to get that slightly wrong. As mentioned already, get some common '65 Yankees and see how this border looks. Once you've seen a few, a fake one is going to stick out like a sore thumb. To me another dead giveaway with this card is some combination of what I just mentioned with dead nuts perfect centering. You just don't see it that often. The real card was frequently cut to be off-center, often times with some degree of tilt to the picture. Perfectly centered copies exist, sure, but if you have a random otherwise midgrade card that someone is selling on Craig's List or eBay, the odds of it being perfectly centered are kinda low. Most fakers get this wrong, since modern cards are generally much better consistently centered than their vintage predecessors.