About soaking cards

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Posted By: Al C.risafulli

The problem that I have with adopting conservation principles from the art world to the card hobby is that in the art world, in a lot of cases, you're dealing with a one-of-a-kind item. In the card hobby, you're dealing with (usually) one of many examples of a card, where their value relative to one another is based on condition.

So not knowing much about art, I would imagine that a Van Gogh is a Van Gogh, and it's the only one. And part of the importance of owning it involves preserving it in such a way that it will last a long time, and be subject to environmental conditions that are beneficial to the paper, the paint, etc. It was painted, and once it was painted, it's complete. Should it get smoke damage from a fire, or someone spill ketchup or beer or whatever on it, it needs to be restored, otherwise it will be lost to history with no remaining copies available.

Cards, on the other hand, were mass produced and mostly given to children. My T206 Frank Chance is worth less than a nicer version of the same card, because the nicer version was ostensibly better preserved over the last 100 years or so. But there are probably thousands of these floating around; this is not a Van Gogh.

Should I pay $100 for my VG copy, then go out and spend $500 on a NMT copy, only to find that the NMT copy was once as ratty as my VG but has been stretched and trimmed, with color and gloss added to the card to make it nice and spiffy, then the reality is that the VG copy has stood the test of time better. The $500 investment becomes a sham, because the $400 difference between the two is based, essentially, on the deception of the alterer.

That being said, I can't make the leap and say that I feel that stretching, trimming, adding color and reglossing is the same as wetting a piece of paper in order to get a card out of a scrapbook intact, or wetting the back of a card to get gunk or glue off it. To me, there is very little difference between wiping dirt off a card with my finger and wiping dirt off a wet card with a Q-tip.

I've told this story before: years ago I won two 1965 Topps Willie McCovey cards in an auction lot. They were both beautiful cards, but one of them had a glop of chocolate on the front of it, about the diameter of a nickel. One day, while shuffling through my cards, a little chunk of the chocolate fell off. I stopped for a second, then I kinda rubbed the front of the card with my thumb. All the chocolate popped right off the card, in about two seconds. I wiped it with the sleeve from my shirt, and it looked good as new. Now it's an SGC 88, and a fixture in my HOF collection. The other one I bought, which had no chocolate on it, was an SGC 84 that I sold. Should I feel guilty about rubbing off the chocolate? Most people say "no". So what's the difference, then, if I use water to accomplish the same thing?



And no, I did not eat the chocolate.

-Al