Does cleaning removed cover gloss? 2 2

[George Peters]

I have two copies of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire and they seem exactly the same edition except for the covers 

 

Version 1: cover is glossy, feels thicker, but inside of cover the color is Grey-ish and the printing is hard to read at times. I hope you can see in the picture it's much more reflective and the light doesn't diffuse as much. 

 

Version 2: cover is not glossy and feels thinner. Hover the inside of the cover is black and lettering is easy to read. The light on the cover diffuses and you can see the texture of the cover much better. 

 

My question is: was cover 2, the non glossy version, cleaned? Does cleaning remove the gloss from the cover? Why does the inside cover look so much better (black and lettering easier to read?) 

 

I'm unfamiliar with cleaning and pressing, so I'd love to know why the difference and how much grade would be affected. It honestly feels like two different covers, but I don't see a upc box or second print denotation anywhere on the non glossy version. 

 

Thanks for your help! 

[steveinthecity]

Do these both have barcodes on the cover? I think I recall seeing there were two versions of this book.

[George Peters]

Neither have barcodes or the box. They should be exactly the same book I think, but the concerts gloss and feel seem wildly different. 

[joeypost]

Could be a very bad press or someone was experimenting with chemicals or some other abrasive dry cleaning method. My money would be on a bad press as I don’t see why there would be a need to clean a cover like that, due to the cover being mostly color and high gloss. 

[George Peters]

On 8/29/2023 at 5:13 AM, St. Unger said:

He's saying one might be Newsstand while the other is Direct.

I understand. I'm saying they both appear to be direct because neither have the bar code or even the box (I've seen some with a blank box and no code). So I think they are both direct, but the non glossy cover feels like a newsstand version given how different and less glossy it is than the other one. That's my confusion. When I had them both out of their bags, my initial thought was the non-glossy was a newsstand, but there's no marking anywhere to indicate that is the case. So my next thought was "Did someone clean this book so badly they ruined it?" But I wanted to check with others because maybe this is just a normal variation of the printing process? I'm not sure.

[marvelmaniac]

On 8/29/2023 at 8:13 AM, St. Unger said:

He's saying one might be Newsstand while the other is Direct.

I know nothing about this book, however, according to MCS there were two issues of #1, the Direct Edition had no box on the cover, the newsstand edition had a barcode.

IMO, if the books do not look the same as far as gloss and that is the only difference, either someone attempted a cleaning as already stated, the books were not stored in the same/proper environment or it was a printing error, the only way you will know for sure is to submit the book(s) to CGC for grading.