Why do I bother buy raw books?

[lou_fine]

Call Vincent and have him look over the book for you to confirm that Metro thinks the 9.4 is accurate. Then tell him you will be sending the book to CGC via walkthru tier and that you may be returning the book if it doesn't grade out at 9.4.

 

I want to buy a certain book from Metro. they advertise it as a 9.4 The book is almost 4,500 dollars....At that price I really want it to come back as the grade they are placing on it....so far I haven't gotten the balls to buy it. I have thought about it, and there isn't a good solution...if they send it off to get graded and it comes back 9.4 ( or above), they will raise the price. If I buy it and it comes back 9.2 (or lower) I just lost a lot of cash....

 

FFB;

 

Not sure if I totally agree with your approach here. I guess it all depends on this $4,500 selling price.

 

From my point of view, all HG CGC books carries some kind of CGC premium. If Metro is selling the book to you at what is basically a raw 9.4 price, then I feel they do not necessarily have to be able to fully back it up with the CGC grade within reason. After all, why should they have to carry the CGC risk if you are not being charged for the CGC premium.

 

If the selling price of $4,500 is more equivalent to the CGC 9.4 selling price (which is more likely here knowing Metro), then I feel that they do owe you some sort of assurance that the book is going to come back with a 9.4 label. This probably means that you should probably be given some type of price break if the book comes back in 9.2 or less condition. But to be totally fair, you should also be expected to pay a higher price if it comes back with a 9.6 label. Works both ways, but this type of deal would have to be agreed upon by both parties beforehand.

 

BTW: Did you ever think of just simply asking Metro to send the book out to you to view on an approval basis first so that you can personally view it before agreeing to buy the book. This might be the simplest solution to your situation here, but I guess it all depends on your relationship with Metro in this case.

[the blob]

it's up to the buyer to come up with a grade when they're buying the book in person. and then to decide how much they're willing to pay. i guess the exception might be a book being sold as high grade that is missing a page or something. a dealer should inspect their stuff and to expect the buyer to catch that in a convention setting is tough. detecting restoration in a convention setting is a different issue too.

 

seriously, grading is all over the place (among dealers and CGC) and many dealers don't even attach a grade to the book, just a price, and then you're left to try and figure out the grade anyway. i dunno, making a dealer a villian because he sells a book as a NM (9.4) and it comes back from CGC a 9.0 or 9.2 when you had the book in your hand and inspected it and agreed with the 9.4...I guess I have an issue with that unless the dealer makes some representation about how CGC would grade it.

[mattbird_home]

it's up to the buyer to come up with a grade when they're buying the book in person. and then to decide how much they're willing to pay. i guess the exception might be a book being sold as high grade that is missing a page or something. a dealer should inspect their stuff and to expect the buyer to catch that in a convention setting is tough. detecting restoration in a convention setting is a different issue too.

 

seriously, grading is all over the place (among dealers and CGC) and many dealers don't even attach a grade to the book, just a price, and then you're left to try and figure out the grade anyway. i dunno, making a dealer a villian because he sells a book as a NM (9.4) and it comes back from CGC a 9.0 or 9.2 when you had the book in your hand and inspected it and agreed with the 9.4...I guess I have an issue with that unless the dealer makes some representation about how CGC would grade it.

 

totally agree with this view- especially the part about grades being all over the place. It's ppart of why I think it's insane to spend serious money on .2 differences in grade. Having said all that, I would never buy a HG book like that without the CGC grade, as that's as close as a stamp of approval you'd get. Buy the bok, not the grade!

[RDK]

A few randon thoughts...

 

While I've been a collector for 30 years now, my experience with CGC is pretty recent. But it's quite clear to me that CGC is all about being extra tough in their grading. If most people - dealers and collectors - judge a book as, say, 9.4, CGC might come back as 9.2 or 9.0. I consider that a "given." Why should a dealer be as strict as CGC on an unslabbed book? If he were, then he should charge a premium for it as if it were slabbed. I know others here have a pretty good handle on how CGC grades and what they might expect from a submission, but that's because they understand that CGC grades harshly.

 

Dealers and collectors both have always had wildly different grading standards (hence the appeal of CGC in the first place). Just look at the numerous PGM books threads. Opinions are all over the map, so who are we to believe? CGC's grade is just an opinion given from an uninterested third party. One may or may not agree with it depending upon one's personal preferences (eye appeal, for example, means more to me than structural integrity in some instances), but CGC's grades are no more "right" than if we all gave our books to Foolkiller or Timulty to grade. CGC merely establishes a standard that we can all (hopefully) measure our books against... a standard that's stricter than most dealers and collectors.

 

When buying books at shows, I really don't put much stock at all in the grade the dealer has assigned to the book. I don't give a [embarrassing lack of self control] what condition he thinks it is. All I care about is the condition that I think it's in and what his price is for it. There was one dealer who I loved to buy from down at SDCC who I always thought undergraded his books. What he called Fine, I considered VF and sometimes better. Consistently. He also refused to discount his books at all. But I didn't mind one bit. CGC may have agreed with his grading standards more than mine, but I got nice looking and tightly graded books that I thought were a bargain for being undergraded. The value is always a compromise between grade and cost. If one dealer prices a 9.4 copy of book X at $50 and another dealer has a 9.0 copy of book X at $50, which is the better deal? What if they both come back from CGC at 9.2?

[RDK]

it's up to the buyer to come up with a grade when they're buying the book in person. and then to decide how much they're willing to pay. i guess the exception might be a book being sold as high grade that is missing a page or something. a dealer should inspect their stuff and to expect the buyer to catch that in a convention setting is tough. detecting restoration in a convention setting is a different issue too.

 

seriously, grading is all over the place (among dealers and CGC) and many dealers don't even attach a grade to the book, just a price, and then you're left to try and figure out the grade anyway. i dunno, making a dealer a villian because he sells a book as a NM (9.4) and it comes back from CGC a 9.0 or 9.2 when you had the book in your hand and inspected it and agreed with the 9.4...I guess I have an issue with that unless the dealer makes some representation about how CGC would grade it.