He knew, and he did it anyway

The trade is well understood in the hobby and rarely stated plainly, so here it is.

What a personalisation costs

An autograph made out to somebody, "To John" or "For Ken", is tied to one buyer. Everybody else is looking at a stranger's name on their wall.

Estimates of the discount cluster in a consistent range. Dealers put it at around twenty per cent. One valuation guide puts a personalised signed photograph at thirty to forty per cent below an unpersonalised one. A specialist dealer in classical and film material reckons only ten or fifteen per cent of collectors refuse them outright, which is why the effect is a discount rather than a collapse.

This index has measured a sharper version of it. Neil Armstrong's unpersonalised examples sell for something like three times his personalised ones, which is a market where the discount is closer to two thirds than one fifth.

The mechanism is simple enough. A signature is a liquid asset and a dedication makes it illiquid.

What Starr did

A dealer who dealt with him across many shows described the habit to Sports Collectors Digest, and the observation is worth having in full.

Starr's signature was neat, which the dealer said "shows what kind of guy he is". And beyond that, he usually took the time to personalise.

The dealer's own framing of why that matters is the part that lands: most signers would rather not, because personalising slows a show down. Starr did it because he wanted the person in front of him to have a good experience.

Consider the arithmetic from his side. A signature takes a few seconds. A name, a greeting and a signature take three or four times as long. At a show with a queue, personalising every item means signing substantially fewer of them, for the same fee.

And every one he personalised was worth less on resale than the one he could have signed instead.

Why most signers do not

It is not meanness. Three reasons, and all of them are reasonable.

Volume. A paid signing has a rate and a duration. Slower signing means fewer items and less money for the promoter who booked the session.

Dealers ask them not to. Somebody buying twenty items to resell does not want twenty different names on them, and dealers are a large share of the queue at any show.

And some signers know exactly what it does. Michael Jordan reportedly asked a collector his name while signing a basketball and was told "eBay", which is the whole economy in one exchange.

The turn nobody mentions

Here is the part that makes this more than a sentimental story.

A personalisation is evidence the signature is real.

A forger has no reason to add one. It takes longer, it introduces more handwriting to get wrong, and it deliberately reduces what the fake will fetch. Nobody manufacturing autographs for profit writes "To Don, a very devoted fan" across the bottom of one.

A collector on one of the long-running hobby forums put it exactly that way: a scammer would not bother personalising, because doing so lowers the value of what he is trying to sell.

So the thing that costs you twenty per cent on resale is, quietly, an argument for the item being genuine. It is not proof and we would not treat it as one, but on a market where an FBI investigation found that most of what was circulating was fake, it is a signal worth knowing about.

When a personalisation adds value instead

Three cases, and they are all about who the name belongs to.

When the recipient is somebody. A book inscribed by Hemingway to Fitzgerald is not a discounted Hemingway. It is a different and better object.

When the writing is the achievement rather than a stranger. "HOF 77" on a Starr rookie is his own record, not somebody else's name. That is the distinction we drew in the piece on what the writing beside a name is worth, where the Gretzky items carrying edition numbers turned out to be priced on the edition rather than the ink.

And when the signature itself is simply better. Collectors report Babe Ruth balls where a personalised example outsold a clean one, because the personalised signature was bolder and more legible. The dedication cost something and the quality of the writing gave more back.

What to do with this

Three things.

Buy personalised if you are keeping it. You are paying a fifth to two fifths less for more of the person's handwriting, and the discount only matters on the day you sell.

Read a dedication as mild evidence of authenticity, not as a defect. Especially on a signer whose market is heavily faked.

And do not pay a premium for a clean signature on a signer who rarely gave one. On somebody like Starr, an unpersonalised example is the more common outcome of a rushed queue, not a mark of distinction.

The thing worth sitting with

The collectible autograph market rewards speed and anonymity. Sign your name, sign it identically, do not slow down, do not write anything that ties the object to the person standing in front of you.

Starr spent years doing the opposite, in full knowledge that it cost the holder money, because the person in front of him had queued to meet him and would rather have their name on it.

Every one of those is now worth less than it would have been. There are people who would not sell them at any price.

This index records documented sales of his signed material, all of which are his 1957 rookie card. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources