[Archive]

Posted By: barrysloate

Let me add a bit to this discussion. A group of four of us, myself included, purchased the estate of Bruce Foster in January of 1990. An eccentric, Foster had a house filled with hundreds of empty cat food cans stinking in his kitchen, about a hundred cats, years worth of newspapers piled to the ceiling, and about 10,000 books of pornography. He also had one of the very great baseball collections, featuring thousands of rare and pristine baseball books, documents, photographs, and eight Harry Wright scorebooks. This is the source of all the books that have come to market to date. The first one I kept for my collection is the 1883 copy that is being ravaged probably as we speak, though over the years I handled most of them. We always suspected that one day a book would be sold and broken up into sections, as they are really no more than the commercial scorebooks that Wright sold himself at his sporting goods store and had professionally bound together for posterity. But to think some spineless idiot is ripping pages out like they were green stamps in a coupon book is reprehensible. I know the book is already destroyed, but maybe he could at least be stopped so that the sections remain intact (I actually sold a few sections from 1890 myself, a year that was incomplete because Wright's health was beginning to deteriorate).
Couldn't this miscreant find something else to break up, like a T206 set or a 52 Topps set? Is a few extra dollars so important that he had to destroy an historical artifact? I would like to know who it is who is perpertrating this ( I haven't checked the board yet to see if he has been identified) and hope he spends eternity shovelling hot coals into a blazing furnace, if you get my drift. I hate to sound like an old crank, but this is no longer the hobby that I once loved. Every golden goose has been cut open to extract every last possible golden egg. Sad indeed.