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Posted By: Morrie

If you don't like it, don't do it. I don't view it as altering a card to, as a number of people have put it, remove excess paper that was never supposed to be there. The implication that those of us who have soaked cards to remove paper that was not factory-applied -- in a manner that's consistent with other preservation and restoration methods -- might be behaving unethically is, to me, a little bizarre. If I tear them out of a scrapbook and lose part of the back, am I being more ethical? Or am I supposed to collect ephemera attached to ephemera? I'd rather just stick to baseball cards, thanks.

Cards that have been soaked don't bother me; I'd buy a card I knew had been soaked, if it looked nice. I might feel differently if I were investing in PSA 8-9 level cards and wanted to be confident that these really were the cards as they were produced 95 years ago, virtually untouched by time. But I'm not. Maybe that's where the difference lies.

Morrie "I (heart) my low-grade t206s" Mullin s

(I will add the caveat that I understand that soaking can be used to temporarily press out surface wrinkles from cards in order to improve the appearance prior to grading, and that some slabbed cards have had tiny wrinkles that had been soaked/pressed re-appear and functionally drop the grade multiple points below what the slab identified the card as being. Please do not interpret my advocacy of soaking to remove paper as advocacy of soaking to bump a card's grade in a manner that has been demonstrated to be temporary. Once the paper's gone, it ain't comin' back, and to me that's a key distinction. It wasn't part of the card, while the wrinkle was.)