Well, of course, I totally disagree with this sentiment, as a collector. I know all-too-well what people did back in the day, because I, too, come from back in the day.
There's no mystery about the fact that people didn't pay much creedence to the catalog-depicted sets back then. But, sometimes, they did.
There's no mystery to the fact that there were few (if any) drum collectors back then....thus no 'rules' for what was deemed as being valuable/desirable and what wasn't as far as drums and drum sets were concerned. But, now, decades later, things are different. Why?
One reason is that people will always want what they can't have anymore -ALWAYS. And since Asia has dominated manufactured goods for so long, we don't even have the choice to get something like a vintage set of American-made drums. So, guess what people want, now?
And, now, in response to that desire, there is a collecting game going on. You can choose to play or not, but there are some 'rules' as to what-is-what.
It makes ZERO difference what people ordered/didn't order back in the day. It's a moot point what they did back then. It was a different mindset altogether.
Having said that, the deal is this, nowadays..... Whatever sets were ordered to match something that Ludwig(for example) put out in a catalog and managed to survive, intact and in great condition for all the intervening years, is what holds premier status in the collecting world, in most cases. There are exceptional kits that don't follow the catalog provenance -celebrity configurations and things like that. But there are separate collectors who specialize in that separate facet of collecting, too, and they are also very particular about provenance.
There can be 10 million customer-ordered, non-catalogued, un-named drum sets out there in the world and maybe only 10 of them are just like the catalog-depicted ones. Guess which ones the collectors will want? And that's the game -getting to those hard-to-attain, desirable examples in as excellent a condition as possible.
Being specific about drum configuration names and sizes, numbers, etc. is what it's all about for some people. It happens all across the board in the world of collectibles. It's part of the fun. It is for me, anyway. It's part of the challenge to the collecting game. Not everyone plays....but I do. If anything, in some case, I wish I'd been more specific about some drums, before I laid my money down...but, oh, well. That's part o the game, too. You win some. You lose some.
There's nothing wrong with being specific in the world of collecting. You have to have a foundation. The old catalogs and names now serve a new purpose in defining some ground rules.
Violin
