True Mint by Rosen

[samosa4u]

Many people credit Al "Mr. Mint" Rosen for making the hobby what it is today. He was making a name for himself in the 1980s, the decade I was born, and nor did he hang around up here in Canada, and so I never met him. However, I have read all the amazing stories on here (thanks to all you old-timers) and one of you did recommend that I read TRUE MINT. Here is a picture of it below:



I finished reading it last night and I was trying to figure out how to discuss it on here with yawl (I learned that word from Leon!) Now, instead of writing an essay, which would put most people to sleep, I decided to do something different here. In this thread, I will just take a few quotes from this book that stood out to me and post them on here. I will add some of my own notes at the bottom, and of course, if there is anybody who wants to discuss a certain topic in more detail, then post away!

Before I start, please remember that this book was published in 1994.

- It [third-party grading] ruined the coin business and it will ruin the card business.

- Produce a 1954 Aaron rookie graded a nine or a ten and people will go berserk. The price is thousands, but if you've got a near-mint to mint one, it's $1,200. It is such a growing spread that it doesn't make sense.

- Most people in this business grade wrong. What does it mean, "mint?" It means new as manufactured. Maybe it is off-center, and maybe there are print lines, but it is still mint.

- People say that a severely off-center card can be graded no better than excellent. Nonsense. If you were blindfolded and I told you that I had in my hand an excellent 1952 Topps Mantle card, what would you envision? You might see slightly fuzzy corners, borders not pure white, perhaps a card that displayed a bit of honest wear. What you would not imagine is a GEM MINT, full gloss card with white borders and 80-20 centering.

- At an auction, I had a Jordan rookie that I described as GEM MINT, unimprovable, side to side, top to bottom. It was returned by the customer saying that the centering was 51-49! Now, this is a sickness.

- Trimming is one of the things that has been going on for a long time.

- In recent years, a lot of guys were bleaching the Goudeys and Cracker Jacks. I looked at some cards on dealers' tables and the Cracker Jacks were whiter than my new underwear.

- I had one Mantle [1952 Topps] left, the best one. I had it on my desk. We had taken all the money from the find and we wanted to remodel our home which we had bought a year earlier. There was a guy actually working on my bathroom one day when the phone rang. It was a California collector, and he wanted to know if I had any Mantles left with the seams on the baseball facing right (it was a double printed card). Sure enough, the seams faced right. He offered me $4,000 for it, and that was more than I had ever gotten for a Mantle. So I asked my wife if I should sell it. She said no, you've always wanted a Mantle, but meanwhile the guy is banging away in my bathroom, charging me thousands of dollars. I decided to sell it. Ultimately, that collector sold the card himself, and it finally would up in the hands of Jim Copeland. When his collection went up for auction at Sotheby's, I ended up being a losing bidder at $41,000 on the same card that I had sold for $4,000 two years before.

My notes:

I found it interesting that a lot of things Rosen mentioned in this book are still being discussed today - 27 years later. It's also crazy that people were trimming and bleaching cards way before they became insanely expensive. And finally, I think Rosen's biggest problem was he couldn't hold on to a damn thing for even a week! ! It was always sell, sell, sell! This hurt him really bad in the long-run.