Quote:
Originally Posted by steve B
I voted yes.
But with some thoughts that the answer isn't 100% clear.
In my other hobby, major auction items are sometimes researched for months. The auction prep - writeups research etc can take a long time.
And even then most auction houses will miss things that are specialized, like plate varieties.
The items that are the best usually come with provenance of having been in major collections and auctions going back a very long time, sometimes into the late 1800's. If there are old certificates that came with the item, they're usually included, along with a new one if it has it.
Occasionally the auction house will disagree with the certificate, like if it mentions a tiny tear but the auction describer can't find it. and that sort of thing is usually mentioned for better or worse.
So it's odd to me that card auctions seem rushed (just like grading) even on fairly expensive items. And there's almost never any of the cards history.
I think that lack of research and history has become the standard in our hobby.
Should that be the standard? I don't think so, even though I'm not in the target audience for the more valuable cards.
The auction house could easily generate an internal census (what a list of existing copies is called in stamps) and generally know most of the history of most higher end cards. The nature of them makes identifying individual copies fairly easy in most cases.
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Curious whether your other hobby has the same population of stuff floating around, and whether it has the same volume of ownership churn.
That level of provenance seems like it would be possible with a smaller universe of stuff that didn't change hands very often, particularly if the universe of stuff stopped being produced 100 years ago, so there is a finite (and even shrinking) overall population.
But with our population of stuff, trying to organize such a task outside of really special stuff, like the T206 Wagner, seems like a task for some combination of Hercules and Sisyphus. Plus it's hard to imagine how anyone could ever hope to get compensated for tracking all of it.