this off of MOPO a movie poster discussion group...
>----- Original Message -----
>i was talking to a good friend of mine and i suggested we had a company
>like comics to grade our movie posters...any thoughts?

There has actually been some preliminary talks by one of the "slabbing"
companies about
getting into movie posters, and they pretty much already came to the
conclusion that trying to slab
a 1-sheet is a lost cause, the expense would be incredible and trying to
carry it around would be
even worse. Even inserts and half sheets would be too tough (though it
would be nice to have
a service that certified legitimate posters (and cut down on some of those
inserts or rolled Foxy
Brown 1-sheets).
But they are very interested in grading/slabbing Lobby Cards!
I for one, think it would be a great idea. Lobbies are a size where
encapsulating them would not be
cost or size prohibitive, they would be archivally preserved (and aren't we
all concerned about
poster preservation) and one of the biggest perks these services provide is
repair/restoration checks.
It would give an added sense of security to know for certain nothing had
been done to your card
(or to know *exactly* what had been done).
An independent 3rd party grading/slabbing service would help sellers other
than Bruce get strong
bids for their items - David would probably get several bids for a graded
Casablanca card.
And super-condition conscious people (like David again - sorry to use you so
much), could place
bids on items they haven't seen , with a much better idea of what to expect
than just relying on a
small picture in an auction catalog or a cropped eBay scan.
Even the prices listed in the Almanac (or other guides) would finally
start to make some sense
if they included grades when relating prices that items brought.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic on this, but I think a service slabbing lobby
cards would actually
be win-win for the hobby, and I would love to hear others comments.

Sean