GreatCaesarsGhost

Here is the latest example of the folly of man . . . http://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=3777f3a0-e4b9-4b7d-98a8-adb44def67ed&appid=1125

Other than the marquee golden age Thursday, this seemed kind of anticlimactic. I just watched an hour of it and quit after supersnipe

I agree with you on the shadow control. As a photographer, that is always one of my first adjustments. Yes, your adjustments look great! This whole business of color manipulation by the person doing the scanning is troubling to me. You never know if what you are gonna receive matches up to what’s advertised. Somebody else has said in the past to pay attention to the blue color in the CGC label, because that is the best clue to color tinkering, but even that is not foolproof

What he said

I think the low grade entry level books will always have a higher price per point because there’s more people can vie for the book at that end of the pool. Above entry level books, the number of people who can afford to bid dwindles considerably. Fewer bidders gets a lower price per point, even though the book is higher grade and, overall, costs more than the entry level book. i know this is true with golden age and have no reason to think it would be otherwise on a high demand silver book like AF 15. Whether it becomes pricier than the golden age keys, I don’t know. i think the trick is to find an entry level book with good eye appeal, because they are not all created equal

Major Inapak, Space Ace?

Agree w top 4, just from sales POV. Still don’t understand the reverence for Sup 1, which is a reprint book, but the market has spoken. Id go w Cap 1 over MC 1

You, my friend, are a steely-eyed comic man

I know you’re not a label guy. Class act. I’ve always liked the top cover especially. Congratulations!

Me too, Jared!

Such a travesty. Think I’ll rename “Masterpiece” to “Ode to the idiocy of mankind”

you are both visionaries

What did you win?

I saw that. I was in the hunt for the 13 but dropped out in the Live part. It hung around Ebay for 6 mos at $100k, and hammered at half of that. its gotta be hard to figure out how to price such things. Turns out bragging rights for the highest grade on a classic cover is only 3 x Guide, not 6 x Guide

Faked me out!

Gotham Kid, didn’t you just pick one of these up off the boards? If so, congrats!

Barring any “Maximum Security” type disqualification, it appears as though it’s Cap 1 by a nose i think if not for the foxing and the rusty staple on the Bat 1, a 5.5 would have defeated the 7.0 Cap 1. Came close enough to be very meaningful to the quiet war we wage on this thread

With 3 hours left, it’s a dead tie: $204k ea, counting the vig. I think they will both pop another $25k

I’m familiar with the book you cite. I’m assuming CGC gave it a blue holder because it did not have extra non-manufacturing staples, and because it didn’t come from a bound volume. So CGC didn’t believe it had been trimmed, either. I’m also told the book does not contain the true contents of the newsstand copy. I don’t mean to substitute my thinking for CGC’s, because they haven’t shared their thoughts with me. I do think the unique nature of the MC 1 deserves a better fate than a PLOD, or qualified label

That’s almost exactly what Metro told me when I asked

So I guess we have to decide the book’s value to us as individuals, irrespective of label. Although we always tell each other “buy the book, not the label”, this still feels like uncharted territory

OK, but what I am hearing here is that CGC would have given this a restored holder. I understand bluechip's point that there is trimming for good reasons and trimming for bad reasons: Bad reasons are when some nefarious book mechanic is trying to hide a flaw, and good reasons are when a publisher or amateur comic enthusiast just wants to create a bound volume. But CGC doesn't appear interested in trying to determine motives by the trimmer, so they've adopted a bright line approach. Like bluechip, a restored holder seems like an indignity inappropriate for a book with this kind of historical significance. I'd like to add it to my collection, but don't want to pay the money if no one else puts the kind of value on it that its current owner has. So . . . a show of hands: is it worth $75k?

Pondering this topic wore me out. Posting my questions wore me out. I don't blame you for not wanting to read it.

So I'll risk being the insufficiently_thoughtful_person who asks, but what color label do books removed from bound volumes normally get? Are they always labeled as "restored"? It would seem like it should be that way. Or, in the case of publisher bound volumes, do the graders just assume we, the buyers, should know the books have been trimmed, so they don't bother with the "restored" designation? Instead, might they tout the provenance and just skip mention of the trim? I thought I understood someone earlier to say the "Pay" copy had also come from a bound volume, but I see in the GPA Analysis that it was given a 9.0 blue label. Did I misunderstand this? Further question. If Jacquet "hand cut" the cover, maybe that doesn't count as a trim job, if he was doing so at the same time he was binding it into this volume. I don't think we will ever know about the exact timing of the "hand cut" of the cover and the time it was put into this bound volume. Lost in the mists of time. But if this book is truly an office copy, do we even care? Is the historical significance of the book enough to overcome all else? I really don't know any of these answers. But the book does seem historically important if its as they say it is.

As I understand it, trimming is hard to detect, even by cgc. And given the awkward cuts posted here, I guess we cannot simply conclude there had to have been trimming involved by the odd page appearance alone. I’m going to ask metro about this.