As a collector, we know that we’re not teaching you anything by telling you that cleaning an item isn’t necessarily a good thing.
A numismatist is interested in its original patina. A philatelist will hunt the hinge, a collector of comic book pages will rave about the scribble still visible under the inking…
Once again, it’s clear that the collector belongs to a different breed!
And it’s not about being allergic to detergent: to clean some items is to take away a good part of their value and in particular their history.
Because it’s true, this is also the collector’s mentality: a preference for an old item over a new one. And within this context, the examples are numerous:
The comic enthusiast will often prefer to pay a fortune for an original edition with one or more misspellings or missing or even nonexistent colors than to buy the same item revised and corrected from the local bookseller!
The vinyl collector will prefer an old record with questionable acoustics rather than the perfect sound of a CD recorded in the studio and copied thousands of times.
A table, even dirty and damaged, will be more popular than a poster.
The value of things can therefore sometimes reach that of years!
As usual, we laugh at your treasured junk! And your reaction will be: “the uneducated…they just don’t understand!” It is precisely this small imperfection, this rarity, that makes the collector love his collection.
But the idea makes its way into the minds of the general public. Would the collector exact his revenge? Vintage has never been so fashionable as it is now! And that’s just as well.
