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Autographs being reinked and restored

Some time ago I seen a beatles set that had been restored By a professional,they touched up the boys signatures around about 15 percent of the signatures were reworked.

Does anyone have any idea if this is a good idea to have signatures restored and would anyone have any pictures of reworked autographs.

Does it effect the value of the sets or signatures?

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Permalink Reply by michelle on February 24, 2015 at 11:29pm

Oh it's really good that Perry made potential buyers aware of this , but as you rightly point out Anthony's insight is really incredibly valuable and important information to know before thinking about bidding or buying an expensive Beatles piece. It is a really informative post and thanks also Paul for starting the post.

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Permalink Reply by Paul on February 24, 2015 at 11:34pm

The problem would be as Anthony mentioned the sets that have been put together and the authenticators are unaware and can't pick them up where it becomes an issue.

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Permalink Reply by michelle on February 24, 2015 at 11:42pm

sure; but it is mega interesting to know and also very important to consider if you are thinking of buying a set. I would not have known this before I read this post; - you learn so much on AML

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Permalink Reply by James on February 24, 2015 at 10:35pm

I hate hearing about stuff like this, but thanks for educating us. I know this goes on. So even if you're pretty sure you got "the real deal", it may actually just be the real "altered" deal. Like I said in my post up above, I can tell that there are a lot of Babe Ruth balls that sure look to me like they've been professionally cleaned, but PSA won't mention this in their LOAs.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Stein on April 6, 2015 at 8:22pm

This is horrible. That's the ultimate forger.

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Permalink Reply by Paul on February 24, 2015 at 8:32pm

Steve crykin, hi mate, would you know anything about this topic?

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Permalink Reply by Thorsten Knublauch on February 25, 2015 at 6:30am

Hi - know some Beatles albums where autographs were planted in. It is no real deal for me - even they are authentic and even the seller honestly says so i wouldn`t buy or even like it. You get a bad feeling looking at it.

Even cleaned items are not the same as without. I would prefer paying a bit more for a good example instead of a cleaned version where dedications or spots have been erased.

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Permalink Reply by Anthony on February 25, 2015 at 7:01am

The problem is that the person who buys an album with the signatures implanted on the album buy them at a slightly discounted price if the seller is honest and mentions this. Then they resell it at the higher market value price and don't disclose this to anyone. This happened to a friend of mine who purchased a Beatles signed album and wasn't notified by the seller the autographs had been planted inside it. It had a COA from a well known respected authenticator. A few years later he offered it to me for sale and I knew that something was wrong because the Beatles don't sign "best wishes from the Beatles" on an album that already has their bands name on it ( that was what I had thought at the time this event took place) and from that I was able to locate the original autographs. 2 of them had come from a piece of stationary and the other from a blank page and the last came from an invitation. The inscription was originally on the piece of paper with the two so it was really easy to spot. Another mistake was that the seller used a late 1964 Paul autograph on the 1963 piece. You could argue that maybe the original person got the 3 signatures in 1963 at one of the two signings the Beatles did for this album and for some reason didn't get Paul to sign it that day and waited a year and a half to get him but that seemed pretty far fetched to me. Needless to say, I informed him of this and after threatening to sue the seller he bought it from he got his money back. The piece was later sold about a year later to a collector in Germany who still believes the album was not created and is 100% genuine. Granted the signatures are real they just weren't placed on the album by the Beatles.