General Forum

I ordered a complete set in 9-pocket pages on eBay.  Got it and it looked great.  Cards are in good shape and the pages look alright at first glance.  The pages look clean, not too old, and they are Ultra Pro Platinums.  However, if you touch the very very top of the pages they feel hardened and some pages actually start to crumble and fray upon touching them.  I replaced all the pages and am not too worried about the purchase because the price was good just for the cards alone.  But does any know how pages end up like this?  I really hope to avoid this happening to my pages in the future.

Interesting. Has to be climate control related I would think?

Just along the tops? Maybe it's sun damage from a shelf in the sun where the binders were stored. The cards probably wouldn't be affected if the binders were closed.

I've bought a few collections where the same thing has occurred to the pages.

The BCW plastic pages from the 90's got rock hard and had some kind of nasty gloss after all these years. I can get the cards out of the pages tho. I got lucky and didn't have any real important cards in them.