Alteration vs. Conservation Defined

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by benjulmag

Peter,

I will never forget an encounter I had in the mid-80s with an experienced collector/dealer who was looking for a particular '33 Goudey card for his personal collection. He was a high grade collector. He finally found the card at a show that I attended and showed it me. I remember taking note that while the condition was very nice, it clearly looked like a card 50+ years old. In my mind it was an ex-mt plus to maybe as high as nr-mt. It was not higher, and that was based on the more lenient grading standards of that era. I remember at the time asking Alan Rosen if he could find me a very high grade '33 Goudey set (minus Lajoie) and what he would charge. After thinking for a moment he told me how difficult it would be to find such a set and how expensive it would be, but if he had one he would charge $4k.

That was the hobby then and what at least my expectations were as to what a high grade card would looked like. Compare that to what one sees today at shows/auctions coupled with the tremendous price differential between grades and perhaps one can understand my skepticsm that such cards haven't been worked on.

I agree. I haven't ever been in a market for such cards but I have been attending shows since 1976 and I never, ever saw T206, Goudey and other prewar cards in the conditions we are seeing now, and I lingered over the eye candy at all of those shows. I don't think it is a N54 thing so much as it is a memory thing: those of us who were around the hobby 30+ years ago know how excruciatingly rare it was to find really nice prewar cards. Now there are literally tens of thousands of T206s in PSA 7 and better. Are we more aware of them due to the Internet, or are there just a lot more of them that there used to be? I don't know the answer but the situation stinks on ice.