Another Great Classic Multiple Bites The Dust

It's long passed for common post 1930 material, but it will not stop for anything earlier.

I personally don't care too much about grading. I will send something in to PF or APS to simply verify authenticity or repairs, reperfs, Etc Other than that how it looks to me is all that matters.

I almost hesitate to mention this, but a post in another thread lit a light in my head in this regard.

Damaged multiples tend to stay intact, while sound ones, or ones that have at least one stamp sound in them, often get broken up.

I say this just to explicitly narrow the topic a bit - although this was of course implied already.

It would be interesting if someone could make a listing of these different affected multiples with before and after pictures to show the extent and loss of such mutilations of multiples. Then copies of this could be sent to different stamp societies, stamp officials, stamp judges, stamp experts, etc. Others have made such before and after contrast compositions when documenting things that have been destroyed or changed. It would be interesting to see this for the historical recording.

Canyoneer: Exactly as I feel about grading. Actually the only reason I would get an item graded is if I were going to sell my collection. Even then it would be very hard for me to break a very well centered single stamp out of a block or plate block just to get a better price. I pray I will never be so desperate as to do that.

It used to be a philatelic convention that imperforate stamps were collected at least in pairs in order to show an imperforate connection between the stamps with full blocks and multiples being even more preferred. Now we have these single stamps that are trying to change this by taking what I would consider a mutilating and damaging short cut out of all of the other surrounding stamps in defiance of the aforementioned philatelic convention. Are philatelic show judges now highly rewarding those that exhibit these kind of stamps that destroy all of their surrounding stamps as a legitimate and award worthy exhibition item?