Backlist: Slabtown. Comments on the Mania for Plastic Cases on Collectibles
A collection of short posts originally published in another venue in August to October, 2021
Slabtown.
That’s the name of the neighborhood in Portland adjacent to my shop. It’s a neighborhood of upscale condos that used to be filled with concrete-slab industrial buildings (although the name comes from a lumber mill that produced large timber planks, or slabs).
But Slabtown is also a good name for the current collecting era, which is increasingly dominated by slabbed items (stuff encased in plastic and given numerical grades).
Witness the sad history of the only known signed photograph by Shoeless Joe Jackson. The photo started out in a scrapbook of signed baseball photos assembled about 1911 by a photographer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It was handed down in the family for a century when Bill Bowen, a baseball collector, bought it in 2010 for $15,000. When he died in 2015, the scrapbook went to Heritage Auctions, where it was dismembered.
Heritage sold the Shoeless Joe photograph as a loose 8-by-10 photo for $179,250.
That buyer sent it off to a grading service, which gave it a 9.0 Mint (out of 10) condition grade (despite the glue residue on the back from were it was affixed to the scrapbook page). Christie’s and Hunt Auctions sold it for $1.47 million [on October 7, 2021—ed.]. If you are counting, that’s a 150% annual rate of return. Even in today’s ridiculously hot market ($1.2 million for Frankenstein anyone?), that’s a huge increase in just six years.
The only real difference between the two Shoeless Joe sales is the $2 plastic case and the “Mint” grade, which apparently ignores the glue and paper on the back and the destruction of the origial collecton required to extract this photograph.
Why collectors put so much ($1 million plus) faith in a tacky plastic case is beyond me.
Plastic Coffins for Coins
I have a friend who is a vest-pocket coin dealer who trades a small number of items at very high prices. He likes to say, “Look at this” as he hands you a $50,000 coin he just happens to have in his pocket.
The coin market, like that of comic books, has become very condition obsessed, a change that has been spurred on by slabbing, the practice of encasing objects—coins, comic books, video game cartridges, etc.—in plastic holders with a third-party's numerical grade for the item.
Standardized grading and slabbing, which makes it possible to keep track of specific items, has inevitably lead to the publication of censuses of objects, sorted by condition. In comics, coins, and other collecting fields, you can now know how many other exemplars exists that are better than yours.
In January, the finest graded 1796 US $2.50 gold piece (rated MS 65 on a scale of 70) sold at auction for $1.38 million. My friend just happened to have one of those coins, which he purchased 35 years ago.
He decided to send it to an auction being held in conjunction with the annual American Numismatic Association show. His coin graded MS 62 and is tied for the fourth nicest example. It sold for $456,000. He was somewhat disappointed in the result but as he texted me, “well it beats being poked in the eye with a stick.”
In the arena of slabbed collectibles, the difference between the best and the second best can be significant and there is a mad rush to slab even objects in lesser grades. A concern for condition has turned into a fetish for grading, with all pretense of even wanting to touch the object replaced with an affection for plastic cases.
Fortunately, encapsulating books in plastic and grading them has not yet caught on.1
There used to be an idea in the book world that books with jackets were too complicated to grade. But Wata Games has solved the problem for video games, grading the shrinkwrap and seams (of sealed copies), the boxes, and the cartridges separately. Recently the highest graded copy of the Nintendo Super Mario 64 (9.8 out of 10 for the box; shrinkwrap A++) sold for $1.56 million. Just a few months earlier, a 9.4, A+ copy sold for just $38,400. The demand for grading is so intense that the current wait time is 5 months for a video game; comic books have similar delays, despite the grading companies adding hundred of employees this year.
Perhaps books will escape the grading mania, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t. All that’s missing is an entrepreneur willing to take it on. Whatever the future may hold, the traditional advice is still the best—collect because you love it and buy the best copy you can afford.
PS: I tend to think that book descriptions have grown too long winded on average, but if you look at the coin links above, you’ll see that coin descriptions go on at surprising length given they are simply pieces of metal people used to carry around as change. By contrast, video game descriptions are almost comically hyperbolic—“The cultural significance of this title and its importance to the history of video games is paramount”—and short: the entire catalog copy for the $1.5 million video game cartridge is just four lines.
Almost as soon as I wrote that, I saw this on the Instagram feed of True1stBooks, a bookseller right here in Portland, Oregon, who has started having plastic cases manufactured for paperback books. Unlike true slabs, at least these cases are open on one end so you can take the book out.