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Why I Don’t Trust COAs<\/h1>\n\n\n\nAn exploration of the contradictions and conflicts of interest in the certificates of authenticity industry<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
MAR 4, 2024<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Paying the Bills Why I Don\u2019t Trust Certificates of Authenticity and an Argument Why Maybe You Shouldn\u2019t Either<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I think Certificates of Authenticity (COAs)1<\/a> for autographs are bullshit, and here\u2019s why:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you can\u2019t trust 100% of a company\u2019s COAs, then you have to double check all of them. That means you are authenticating autographs on your own, so what do you need an authentication service for?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Thanks for reading Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Subscribe<\/p>\n\n\n\n Currently, the largest and most respected autograph authentication service is probably PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator), a subsidiary of Collector\u2019s Universe, a formerly public company that was taken private in a Here\u2019s an example of a famous autograph they authenticated:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I read this as \u201cTo Leslie and [?], the most beautiful reading is done between mother and daughter\u2014\u2026read on\u2026. X [love<\/em>, as in xoxoxo<\/a>] D[ad].<\/p>\n\n\n\n This inscription is in an otherwise worthless, badly water damaged copy used book. The asking price from an eBay seller was $12,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The seller used PSA\u2019s reputation to justify the price<\/a>: \u201cTHIS HAS BEEN AUTHENTICATED BY A RECOGNIZED WORLD LEADER. It is beyond question.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s what PSA would like you to think.3<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n But this isn\u2019t even a forgery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s just a father4<\/a> giving a copy of The Catcher in the Rye <\/em>by J. D. Salinger to his wife and daughter to read together. It was kind of sweet, until PSA said it was a rare inscribed book by Salinger, one of the most reclusive and collectible authors of the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apparently the person at PSA who authenticated the autograph read the signature as \u201cJ.D.\u201d\u2014at least that\u2019s the most generous interpretation I can come up with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Salinger tended to sign his name \u201cJ. D. Salinger\u201d but people didn\u2019t call him \u201cJ.D.\u201d To those who knew him, he was Jerry. Assigning the autograph to Salinger fails on the basic facts, without even considering the handwriting.5<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in December, I contacted PSA about this autograph and informed them that they had probably made a mistake. I exchanged several cordial emails with a customer service representative that went nowhere (the cert number was still showing as authentic<\/a> the last time I checked it). I\u2019d excerpt PSA\u2019s emails but they come with threatening-sounding language about unauthorized quoting that I think is legal mumbo jumbo, but why chance it? I do wonder, though, what they have to hide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now you might think that PSA would be concerned about their liability if someone relied on their COA and paid $12,000 for this book, only to learn later that it wasn\u2019t actually signed by Salinger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most members of the major bookselling associations (ABAA<\/a>, IOBA<\/a>) would feel this way because as long as we are in business, we have to offer money back guarantees to our customers if we sell something that turns out not to be authentic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PSA calls itself \u201cthe only third-party grading service to offer a guarantee<\/a> on its services,\u201d and it says that the \u201cPSA Authenticity and Grade Guarantee\u2026is fundamental to PSA\u2019s reputation<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it\u2019s always good to read the fine print, especially when there\u2019s a hedge fund involved looking to make a significant return on an $850 million investment. By my count, there are currently 18 itemized exceptions<\/a> to the PSA \u201cguarantee\u201d totaling more than 1600 words (compared to 350 words for the guarantee itself).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Collectors and dealers relying on PSA\u2019s autograph authentication services and COAs should pay attention to this part of the PSA \u201cguarantee\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Guarantee does not apply to the authenticity or grade assigned to any autograph, whether certified by a manufacturer or applied after its release.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In short, PSA is happy to take your $100 to authenticate a J. D. Salinger autograph but they make no promises about whether their authentication opinion is actually right. Perhaps that\u2019s why they didn\u2019t bother to correct the apparently bogus Salinger I told them about. They got their money. For everyone else, it\u2019s buyer beware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This supposed Salinger autograph is by no means the only time PSA\u2019s authenticators have made an egregious error<\/a>.6<\/a> Here\u2019s a sports card with a printed signature<\/em> on the front that was encapsulated in an \u201cauthentic auto[graph]\u201d plastic slab. To be fair, sometimes it can be hard to tell a printed signature from a real one (but, of course, that\u2019s one of the reasons you might want to hire a professional autograph authenticator).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this case, however, the back of this Justin Verlander card states twice<\/em> that the autograph on the front is a reproduction, but PSA took the money and certified it, relying on the autograph exception on their guarantee not to take any responsibility for the error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Collectors who value COAs from companies like PSA might brush off errors like these as the inevitable result of grading hundreds of thousands of autographs. A few errors are bound to creep in, they might say. But now that you\u2019ve seen one bogus PSA \u201cSalinger\u201d autograph, would you trust their judgment on this one for $98,000<\/a>? (permalink<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n These errors aren\u2019t errors of judgment made by someone trying to identify a real signature from a good forgery. The Salinger I reported to PSA and the printed Verlander autographs aren\u2019t celebrity autographs at all. No company that professes to have expert authenticators should ever<\/em> make this kind of mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I return to my original point. If you have to second guess any <\/em>autographs, then all the COAs are effectively worthless because you still have to do your own authentication. COAs are also arguably counterproductive because they cause collectors and dealers to let their guard down and may make them more likely to accept a bad autograph with a COA than a bad autograph without one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Autograph authentication is hard, particularly when someone is trying to evaluate a simple signature. There are lots of forgers at work; more now than ever before (user saveafricanow<\/a> on eBay is my personal favorite, both for the volume of forgeries that they sell and for how truly awful all of the \u201csignatures\u201d are).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even the world\u2019s best handwriting experts will have a hard time identifying a good forgery, particularly when the handwriting example is very small, like the one, two, or three words of a person\u2019s name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wondered who the autograph authenticators at PSA are, but of the nearly 800 employees<\/a> on LinkedIn, none are obviously working on autograph authentication.7<\/a> One authenticator<\/a> I identified got her job following thirteen years working as a \u201cCustom Logo Order Specialist\u201d at Northern Safety and Industrial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t mean to pick on this employee, but getting good at authentication requires years of experience, none of which is particularly evident in the LinkedIn profiles of Collectors\u2019 (the parent company of PSA) employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I searched Justia and found a single US court case<\/a> where PSA\u2019s opinion about authenticity was accepted by a court, and that was for a baseball card that had been touched up with paint, an objectively obvious alteration that was easily confirmed by other sports-card authenticators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PSA is not the only autograph authentication company pumping out tens of thousands of COAs each year. Autograph authentication has become an industry with (at least) tens of millions of dollars of sales each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n James Spence Authentication (JSA) is another autograph authentication firm popular with collectors (James Spence Jr, the founder, also founded PSA\u2019s autograph authentication division. JSA\u2019s COAs are now signed by James Spence III, who is taking over from his father).<\/p>\n\n\n\n While a much smaller company than PSA, JSA\u2019s LinkedIn<\/a> page at least has a few people identified as autograph authenticators. But as far as I can tell, neither PSA nor JSA obviously employ former law enforcement officers with experience with forgery, nor are any of their employees identified as belonging to the professional organization, the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to LinkedIn, one autograph authenticator<\/a> came to JSA from SGC<\/a>, a sports card grading company (recently acquired by the hedge-fund-owned parent company of PSA). I don\u2019t want to pick on this fellow, either, but according to his resume he went from an entry-level position at SGC to \u201cdirector of autograph authentication\u201d in less than 18 months. His previous job, before he became an autograph authenticator? For eight years, he cleaned airplanes between flights for JetBlue.8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n As for this employee\u2019s success rate at authenticating autographs, he claims to be \u201cable to achieve 99% accuracy.\u201d Sounds pretty good, but that implies that at least one in every 100 SGC autograph authentication was wrong. As the lead authenticator, this expert<\/em> said he \u201cauthenticated highly valued items autographed by superstars such as Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Wayne Gretzky.\u201d Imagine: One year you are picking up pretzels off the floor of a budget airline and the next you are deciding which pieces of paper with \u201cBabe Ruth\u201d written on them are worth tens of thousands of dollars and which are worthless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Now that you know that one of JSA\u2019s sports authenticators spent more time working with an airport ground crew than producing COAs, how confident are you in JSA\u2019s authentication of this 5-figure Mickey Mantle autograph<\/a> certified during his tenure?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The resume of this expert<\/em> perfectly captures the circular reasoning at the center of the whole industry of autograph authentication: \u201cWorking closely with some of the largest auction houses in the nation,\u201d he writes, \u201cI authored hundreds of LOA\u2019s (Letters of Authenticity) for items which have sold at auction at significant prices.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, collectors pay large sums for authenticated items and then the authenticators argue that the large sums validate their authentications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JSA is a prolific issuer of COAs for Stephen King signatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n King has signed a lot of books over the years, including more than 50,000 signed, limited editions by my estimate.9<\/a> For many years, King also let collectors send in books to be signed, and he employed assistants who kept track of all the books and corralled the author into signing them. Despite the large number of real autographs in existence, a King signature often adds $1,000 or more to the price of a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent years, King has not gone on book tours, nor does he make many personal appearances, yet newly signed Stephen King books keep turning up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I asked an advanced Stephen King collector about JSA\u2019s COAs for Stephen King autographs. She responded, \u201cUnfortunately it\u2019s prevalent that JSA-authenticated Stephen King signed books are mostly fakes\u2026 Furthermore it is in the interest of unscrupulous sellers of fakes to get their copy \u2018authenticated.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did a bit of digging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On January 4, 2024, some lucky person had six King books authenticated by JSA. The ink is still fresh and shiny, and yet they look like Stephen King signatures from ten years ago. Nevertheless, these autographs were issued certificates YY73722<\/a>, –23<\/a>, –24<\/a>, –25<\/a>, –26<\/a>, and –27<\/a>.10<\/a> Impressive!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not nearly as impressive, however, as the run of 38 Stephen King autographs consecutively authenticated by JSA on or about December 6, 2023 (beginning with letter of authenticity no. YY65473<\/a> and ending with YY65511<\/a>. You can easily check the adjacent certificates by simply changing the URL in your browser\u2019s address bar).<\/p>\n\n\n\n A number of books from that amazing haul turned up in the eBay store A&E Sports hosted by the seller y2littlek<\/a>. They recently sold a 9th printing<\/a> of the Perennial Classics reprint of King\u2019s classic On Writing<\/em> for $1,499 (available new, not signed, on Amazon, for $17.49<\/a>). That book came with JSA\u2019s letter of authenticity no. YY65493<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several of these 38 autographs are very atypical of Stephen King. Even if they were real and signed under some extremely unusual circumstance, it\u2019s hard to understand how JSA can authenticate them; at best an autograph expert should say their opinion is inconclusive. (This is another problem with the authentication business. They give refunds or credits if they can\u2019t reach an opinion; absent scientific testing or detailed provenance research, a lot of autographs should come back inconclusive, but the COA mills don\u2019t make any money if they say that.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n If someone handed in a stack of 38 books signed by Stephen King for evaluation, I think any professional autograph expert should be very skeptical. Of the thousands of Stephen King collectors out there, not very many have managed to acquire 38 signed trade (not limited) editions. How likely is it that a sports guy like y2littlek would turn up a world-class collection of books signed by Stephen King?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Herein lies another contradiction at the heart of autograph authentication\u2014the firms and their customers both want the same thing: lots of real autographs. When a business that should be skeptical is dependent on giving the positive results their customers want, they have a conflict of interest. If JSA doesn\u2019t return enough positive results, the customer can turn to PSA, or Beckett, or others. Collectors who buy autographs accompanied by COAs are not actually the authenticators\u2019 customers, they just rely on the authenticators\u2019 opinions. (It\u2019s exactly the situation in this scene in <\/a>The Big Short<\/a><\/em> about how the rating agencies gave good marks to junk mortgage bonds, helping to perpetuate the banking crisis of 2008).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like all businesses, PSA and JSA rely on large-volume customers to drive profits. Large-volume customers will switch services if they pay for too many autographs that come back as fake. JSA charges $50 for a Stephen King COA so a batch of 38 books means almost $2,000 in revenue; the eBay seller y2littlek has nearly 700 items listed<\/a> that are accompanied by JSA COAs, which equals piles of money for JSA. This is exactly the sort of situation that can lead to errors in judgment. When their livelihood is at stake, even people with good intentions can be swayed to make decisions they might not normally make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you find my arguments compelling, a collector might reasonably ask what they should do if they want to collect signed books. Fundamentally, the desire for a COA reflects a keen wish for certainty. The COA companies feed this with their \u201cletters of authenticity\u201d and \u201ccertificate numbers,\u201d while renouncing all guarantees in their fine print (JSA\u2019s policies state<\/a>, \u201cJSA makes no warranty or representation and shall have no liability whatsoever to the customer for the opinion rendered by JSA on any submission.\u201d) Certainty about autographs cannot be 100%. Even if you witness the autograph session, you can\u2019t transfer that memory to anyone else. We are all stuck making our own judgment calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But here are a few guidelines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Be careful out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Authentically yours,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scott Brown<\/strong><\/em> 1<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Many autograph authentication company\u2019s issue letters of authenticity (LOAs), rather than certificates of authenticity (COAs), but collectors tend to call them COAs and I will too. James Spence Authentication (JSA), as an example, issues letters of authenticity that have unique certification numbers rather than letter numbers.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 2<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The deal for the company was so hot that the hedge fund and its investors had to pony up $850 million<\/a> after originally agreeing to do the deal for $700 million. Lots of billionaire money is pouring into the collectibles industry. Collectors, the new parent company of PSA, has been on a buying spree, acquiring an auction house and another sports card grading company. The New York Times recently ran a story about the increasingly high-dollar competition<\/a> for sports trading card companies [behind a paywall]. Billionaires have figured out that trading cards\u2014which cost a few cents to manufacture\u2014can be turned into tens of thousands of dollars by adding a fraction of a cent worth of ink from the pen of a star athlete. There may be no higher margin business. The authentication business, particularly certifying and encapsulating (slabbing) items, is also hugely lucrative, as the companies charge a percentage of the value of the object, which can be thousands of dollars per trading card, comic, and video game. Autographs are still charged only a flat rate because that\u2019s how everyone does it. As soon as one of the firms changes to a percentage-of-value model for autographs, the others may well follow\u2014it\u2019s the same work, only it would be much more money.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 3<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you go to JSA\u2019s website to validate one of their COAs, the prompt offered is \u201cVerify the validity of PSA & PSA\/DNA certification numbers.\u201d On the JSA site, visitors are invited to \u201cVerify authenticity<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 4<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Or perhaps someone whose first name begins with D.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 5<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Very few \u201ccelebrities\u201d consider autograph collectors when signing items, which makes authentication inherently difficult. We all vary how we write all the time [I wrote about that here<\/a>]. I found one example<\/a> of Salinger signing a letter to a friend with his initials (which is a lot different from signing a book for a stranger) and \u201cxx\u201d for \u201clove,\u201d which is stylistically in the same ballpark as the Salinger book inscription I wrote about above.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As these initials suggest, Salinger was fond of printing rather than writing cursive. As he got older, his handwriting became a blend of printing and cursive, but I haven\u2019t seen an example that is purely cursive like the book inscription attributed to him by PSA.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 6<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The same card collector on YouTube exposed faked signed Willie Mays cards<\/a> which have problems with both the cards and the signatures, yet examples were certified by both PSA and CSG<\/a> (also known as CGC\u2014why so many three initial names in this field?). What his video also demonstrates is the amount of effort needed to closely compare authentic and forged items; signature authentication probably doesn\u2019t cost enough to be done well by skilled (read: highly paid) professio<\/em>nals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 7<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Searching Collectors\u2019s (PSA\u2019s parent company) LinkedIn page<\/a> on March 2, 2024, for the term autograph turns up a person who lists their job title as \u201cfollower of Jesus Christ\u201d, an \u201cintermediate sales associate\u201d, a \u201csales supervisor\u201d, and one autograph \u201cgrader\u201d (adjacent to authentication in the sports autograph field, related to how perfect the signature is on an artifact).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n When I fly, I greatly appreciate the people who clean the planes between flights, especially when there\u2019s a short turn-around time. I just don\u2019t see how that prepares someone to separate real autographs from forgeries.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/strong>These rare-books newsletters are published in conjunction with my latest list of new arrivals<\/a>, this time a group of modern first editions from Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and other writers. If you are a fan of Larry McMurtry, I have a number of signed items on eBay right now<\/a>, with no reserve (I needed the space for the McMurtrys that will be on my next list).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
$700<\/s> $8502<\/a> million hedge fund deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8daa09d1-5cdb-4c37-843b-75b95a0f202b_646x985.jpeg\")
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Downtown Brown Books, ABAA, IOBA<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F814195b2-502b-4094-b8f5-f9fe15cb717e_292x66.jpeg\")
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