Charles Conlon Fakes, Baseball Magazine Stickers & A Brief Tutorial

[Forever Young]

Originally Posted by prewarsports

In my opinion the older the photo the more often it was trimmed. Pre WWI, you see A LOT of trimmed photos. In some archives as much as 80% of the pre WWI images are trimmed at some point by the newspaper editors or even the photographers by themselves. It has a lot to do with photographic processes at the time. Many collectors resort to the thinking that if it was trimmed before and has left a wavy inconsistent edge, cleaning it up a bit by trimming it nicer is not a sin, but touching a border that is original just to improve its condition is not acceptable. Similar to the philosophy of strip cards on the baseball side. If the card was already ripped or trimmed, most people don't care if you clean it up a bit. If you take an untouched sheet of strip cards and trim them all to make mint condition cards for grading, your going to have some detractors. After WWII you rarely see trimmed images with the exception of wire photos where newspapers often took off the captions and glued them to the back so they would not show up in publication.

Agree with all of this. There will be people who trim after the fact no doubt. It is unfortunate but nothing can really be done. If you like an image that is trimmed, buy it knowing many were trimmed but it is possible it was done later.
As far as value goes... a full image will always be better than one trimmed with everything else equal. HOWEVER... many images are 1-5 of a kinds particularly pre-ww1 so really, it doesn't detract it at all. Particularly if Rhys' 80% rule is close. Do the math... beggars can't be choosers if they want a particular image and A trimmed version is all that is available..

Originally Posted by Runscott

Mark, Burkes are special only in the sense that there is a larger year range of prints where you can't tell what part of the range they were printed in. If there was no type system, as a photo collector you would treat all such prints the same. Same for the Ruth photos - how are you going to know that the 1919 print is actually a 1919 print, and not a 1915? In essence, both examples are treated the same - it's just that with Burkes it is more likely that you will call something 'Type I' when it was actually printed outside the 2-year range.

I don't think I have ever actually written 'in essence'.

Thank you for your objectiveness Scotty. To set the record straight... IDK what PSA DNA does exactly here. It is just what I have gathered by different paper and stamps burke used coupled with the authenticated examples I have seen. These(burke) were open to the public(not news photos) and obtained directly from burke studios. Therefore, they are a different animal all together.