Page quality

[Guest]

James,

 

Sure, from page 80 of CBM 94, answered by Steve Borock in response to a question from West Stephan -

 

"West, you have answered the question for us. Whenever there is a "split" page quality like "off-white to white" pages it means that the edges are the first color mentioned and the center is the second color mentioned. We feel that the split page quality is the best way for the buyer to visualize the page quality instead of giving it just one color/shade. CGC would be doing a disservice to the consumer if the edges of the pages were cream and the center was off-white by only calling the pages "cream" while at the same time giving pages that were cream all over the same designation."

 

[drbanner]

I agree with James here - I believe by "edges", Steve's referring to the edges of the paper around the image, not the 0.0001 mm edge of the piece of paper. On the majority of books I've seen with poor paper quality, it's worse at the edges and gets better towards the middle of the paper. In particular, you often see a cream/tan "halo" on the interior cover edges of golden age books.

[murph0]

Yep, usually tanning occurs around the "frame" of the page on most books with tanning I've seen.

 

Brian

[fantastic_four]

That's what I see most often also. I also sometimes see the pages towards either the back of a book or towards the front of a book be darker than the other half. I've always assumed that when this occurs, the copy was stored with one side towards an external hot or humid environment and the other side away from that environment. Such as a comic sitting on the top of a stack, or towards the top of a stack. An extreme example of this would be a comic sitting with the backside facking up in a window sill; the pages toward the back should go off-white/cream/tan faster than the pages at the bottom facing away from the sun.

 

The quote from Borock is slightly unclear, but based upon every interior I look at, he's gotta be talking about the interior "edges," not the edges visible from the exterior. I have assigned a numerical grade and page whiteness grade to every unslabbed book in my collection worth more than $10 (near-complete runs of FF, Spidey, Daredevil, X-Men); I did this partly for insurance purposes and partly to teach myself grading. The "halo" around the edges Banner describes is extremely common and affects a much, much larger surface area than the outer edges. I give it a 95% chance Borock meant the inner edges.

 

The one thing I hadn't though much about until this thread is my assumption that the mixed descriptions could be used to describe both interior pages that have a "halo" and pages that fall somewhere between the major descriptions (white, off-white, cream, etc). I got this assumption from Overstreet's Whiteness Level scale, where "White" is 10, "Off-white" is 8, "Tan" is 5, etc. A 9 on that scale is somewhere between "White" and "Off-white," so I naturally assumed that page shade would be called "Off-white to white."

 

Borock does not explicitly say in that quote from CBM that the mixed descriptions are not used to describe page quality as a midpoint between the major descriptions; he just affirms that it is often used to describe pages that exhibit the "halo." I think that CGC does use the mixed descriptions to describe midpoint page quality. I say this from very limited experience, though. I submitted a Spidey 9 that did not have a "halo" of mixed page quality that was approximately OWL 9--worse than white but better than off-white--and CGC gave that copy the exact page whiteness I thought they would, "Off-white to white."

 

If Steve is reading this, can you clear it up? If there is no response over the next day or so, I'll post the question to the "Ask CGC" forum.