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People with Razors..or, How to Destroy a Jackie Gleason.

Very disturbing. Dedication, 1/21/53 postmark and context sliced away...I should have kept it just to prevent this.

Plastic really will ruin the planet...

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That literally makes me ill.   They could just mat it out.   To me that is vandalism and diminishes the value greatly in my mind.

+1 Absolutely. It was a standard 1950's USPS postcard - it would have fit in a slab. This was unnecessary and very shortsighted. Indeed, value and desirability are greatly affected. It is no longer original. I would never consider such an item.

Not to mention they destroyed Jackie Gleason's handwriting.  Are modern collectors so vain they have cannot have personalization's?   I have argued against this type of destruction for years.  It is like those razor cut card people that have destroyed documents, cards, photographs it fit something into a stupid "card."  Very sad an upsetting to see a piece of classic television history treated in that way.  The person also did themselves no favor because the fact it was postmarked and dated made it worth even more.

And the new owner will NEVER know that January 21st, 1953 was the morning after the episode Suspense was filmed live...such a great loss.

Yes, I just do not have words to describe it.  I love personalization of items the more writing in the person's hand the better.

I have seen numerous examples of this happening including to a Martin Luther King, Jr. signature where they cut off the personalization and “Best Wishes” just to make a custom card out of it. I later saw the “Best Wishes” clip sold separately for over $100. 😬

Oh, that just adds insult to injury when they do that.  It is like people that buy an ALS then cut out each word to sell.  Just boggles the mind.  

A lot of the shenanigans related to trimming autos/reselling them were motivated by pandemic-era craziness fueling a rise in collectibles across the board.

It's why you had nonsense like Topps charging absurd premiums for their Transcendant line (where some of the biggest hits were cut autos from famous celebrities), Piece of the Past (mystery boxes with cut autos) and even more modern fare like some card manufacturers that cut autos for their various specialty sets.

Much of it was fueled by dumb money and has since cooled significantly, though it hasn't gone away by any means. Personally, I'd rather hold on to some items for a few decades if it means they don't end up in the hands of collectors who are willing to deface the book.

I've had that same mindset about the high-end pieces (comparatively speaking, for me only) that I've owned, such as the Roberta Williams lithograph, some of the rare Pierre Trudeau stuff I've consigned, or the Farley/Spade book I sold through Goldin. All of those items were ones I would have been pleased to keep in my collection, but the value proposition was high enough, and I had enough assurances in most cases that the collector valued the item as a whole, not just the auto themselves, to make it worth my while, both personally and financially.

I've got a set of signed Atwood autographs I purchased last month that I would be mortified to see cut up, because the collection as a whol was a large collection owned by a dedicated collector who messaged her over decades and had some key ties to the promotion of her work in France. You would lose all that background and context if those signatures were chopped out from the rest of their inscriptions.

"Are modern collectors so vain they have cannot have personalization's? "

Yes, and especially bad as I think he dedicated on the very rare occasion he did sign something other than just "Jackie Gleason".

" Are modern collectors so vain they have cannot have personalization's? "

Yes. All the time.

I hang around with a collector buddy (we swap signed books and hit up thrift stores) who has outright told me many times that, when it comes to signed sports stuff he owns, he's far more likely to clip the signature out and skip the personalization because it "sells better". And my friend is hooked in with other sports collectors who do the exact same thing and then flip those "altered" items at shows, up to and sticking them into books and on collages, under the mindset that it will result in a better profit for them.

I don't do that sort of thing and won't even consider it -- if anything, I'd rather keep expensive books I have (Gilmour/Aldrin/Ball/et al.) out of the hands of others because I'd rather not see someone cut out half the writing with the intent of trying to flip it for short-term profit.

I suppose I look at autographs almost like historical artifacts even if the person is still alive.  I like personalization's because it gives more handwriting to study.  I have nothing against people making money, but I think they are foolish when they destroy things.  I would pay far more for an unaltered autograph and I bet they would make more selling it that way.  In the case of the Gleason they could have matted out the inscription if they had to and still not harm the card.  

Why anyone would wish to blot out an inscription by a signer on any kind of item is completely beyond my understanding.

Only a moron would consider doing that to be providing some kind of advantage in the item's desirability or "value". If anything, the opposite is true.

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