[78-L] Autographs

[fnarf at comcast.net]

My favorite autographs are those on sports cards. I've seen guys at games with big binders of cards in sheet protectors, paying kids to go get them signed for him. Presumably he then sells them on Ebay or somewhere. And we wonder why athletes are cynical about this sort of thing.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Cary Ginell" <soundthink at live.com>
To: 78-l at klickitat.78online.com
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 5:14:41 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [78-L] Autographs


I never buy autographed items, although I have many that I personally got signed, including photographs, record album covers, books, etc. I didn't care about authenticating them. I knew I was there and that's all that counts. I have acquired some records, however, with signatures on them. My most prized is "Bullfrog Moan"/"A Handful of Riffs" by Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang (aka "Blind Willie Dunn") on OKeh 8695, which was autographed in white ink by Johnson in 1948 (he dated it). I wasn't there to get this one personally, obviously, but when I found it in a stack of 78s I bought at an antique shop, I nearly hit the roof.

Cary Ginell

> Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:03:31 +0000
> From: fnarf at comcast.net
> To: 78-l at klickitat.78online.com
> Subject: Re: [78-L] Autographs
> 
> > And,  she was one of the first and most successful to pull a very irritating 
> > scam:  She had a ton of bookplates printed up which say "From the library of 
> > Jack London" with an illustration of a wolf's head.  Her original plan was 
> > to make sure that all his books which had been in the house when he died 
> > were so marked.    But there seems little question that she ended up 
> > slapping them into books which Jack London had never even seen,  much less 
> > owned.
> 
> This kind of thing is extremely common. Some ridiculously high percentage of "autographed" or otherwise "associated" copies of books are fakes, ranging from real signatures tipped into a book that they were never near in the writer's life, to out-and-out forgeries (which are not hard to do, but are often hard to spot). John Dunning devoted one of his excellent "Cliff Janeway" books, about a detective-cum-bookseller, to the subject, "The Sign Of The Book".
> 
> I've never understood the appeal, myself. A simple autograph -- what does that do for you? It's celebrity-worship, I suppose; the glow of proximity; but unless there's some content to the inscription, like one of Vladimir Nabokov's famous butterfly drawings (which add tens of thousands to a book's price) or a long personal inscription to someone (I have a novel by Bernard De Voto with a several-page-long letter to a friend in the front matter), I don't see the appeal. A cancelled check? Does that increase my understanding or appreciation of Gershwin's music any? How much would you pay for a pair of his socks?
> 
> -- 
> Steve
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