The Philatelic Foundation Grading Upgrade

Rog, the vast majority of stamps belong in the trash. We are not talking about those and nobody care about them. It isn't a teeny tiny problem. We have lost a significant portion of the top 1% to grading.

In the coin business, dealers like to brag of their successes but spend little time detailing their failures. I would suspect the same for stamps. With that said, there has been much discussion about the sacrifice of multiples to produce " the perfect stamp".....but how about all of the other unsuccessful attempts at the same quest that fall short? For every imperf multiple that produces a 100 Jumbo single, is it safe to assume there are at least several other attempts that don't? I'm not sure that "the sky is falling" and every multiple is being sacrificed to the grading gods, however the greed factor would certainly imply that we must be losing some. On a more encouraging note, almost all of the rare Gross multiples were absorbed by collectors, and I believe few if any, were separated for maximizing resale or grading purposes.

We won't know that until they start showing up for sale in one form or the other.

'
How about the (implied) OP question of what The Philatelic Foundation Grading UpGrade means for/about the hobby?

Hints: grading has arrived, grading is here to stay, grading ain't so bad, grading helps more than it hurts, grading is a cool way for even a non-profit to pay the rent, grading is a minor-but-welcome part-time job that rewards many years of philatelic study ...

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

"grading ain't so bad, grading helps more than it hurts"

Grading is a cancer.

Rev - But how do you really feel?

its a times like this that I am glad that I collect match and medicine revenue stamps.

I just spent way too much time researching the cut up multiples and you know what? Mutilated multiples of the type that cause such outrage are very, very rare birds indeed to the point of being inconsequential. These things are almost exclusively created from multiples that are common. A few 9's to be sure (not good) but almost exclusively consist of low value imperfs that were cut in order to entice a fool to part with $2000 for a $35 stamp.

Need to concentrate on hating grading for bringing continuity or more people to the hobby or creating a more vibrant market or helping dealers /auction houses keep the lights on but the mutilation horror is really just fake news.

You really don't want me to tell you how I really feel. I chose the kinder remark here.

You don't seem to understand that not everything that gets cut up is rare enough to show up easily, but was still scarce enough to where it should have been left alone. And I am sure you are not aware of the revenue rarities that have been cut up, including largest known multiples, some that were unique for their size.

If you invested a lot of research time then why the 45 second summary here? How about presenting your discovery methods and data so we can draw our own conclusions instead of taking your word for it?
Don

Will do Don later today. How about the folks that are saying the opposite presenting their data as well? Seems fair. No? I keep asking for it but nothing ever shows up. I am told to do my own research and so I did.

I agree that when statements are made it is good to back them up. I could be proven wrong and that is OK with me.

Here is a good start.


https://goscf.com/t/52744&SearchTerms=block

Thank you stallzer for the link; that thread did have some good discussion.

It does remind me that Downeast stamps for whatever reason, has regularly been used as a dumping ground for the remainders. I've noticed that time and time again in their sales, where they have 1/2 of a stamp, or some fraction thereof. Its a very obvious pattern.

It's impossible to know how many of these were broken out of multiples during the last 20 years of the grading craze, but you can be sure it's more then a few. For supposedly scarce stamps, there sure are a lot of them. Over 1000 pages of 95 and above just from Siegel.
https://siegelauctions.com/lot_grd....ubmit=Search