But the signatures are different…..

In my relatively short time in this hobby, I have quickly noticed that one person can have endlessly different signatures. I read all the user forums on the autograph websites I belong to and have noticed a lot of new collectors getting freaked out when they get a signature that is not quite the exact match of samples they have seen online.

There is no reason to freak out. Sure, you may get the rare fake or forgery here or there but chances are still real good that your signature did actually come from the celebrity. A number of factors can alter a persons signature.

Have you bought a house or car recently? Remember the 300 pages of documents that you had to sign and initial? Remember how the last few pages had your writing hand cramped up and contorted like a claw and how you could barely sign? Chances are, your last few signatures looked radically different than your first few. But you signed them all. Picture your favorite celebrity. Their assistant has just plopped down a stack of 100 photos to be signed for fans that have written requesting autographs. The same effect will happen. The last photos signed will probably be a little different than the first few….but they were all signed by the celebrity in the same sitting.

Another thing that drastically alters a signature is the location of where it was obtained. A celebrity sitting at a desk signing photos is one thing. That same celebrity, walking a line of fans outside an event where people are thrusting out items to be signed is different. A celebrity out in public, surrounded by fans, trying to walk and sign at the same time, is going to provide a signature that looks like incoherent chickenscratch. But, the signature DID come from the Celebrity, so it is a valid autograph.

The photo above is of a young Dustin Hoffman signing autographs for a crowd of fans. Chances are, nobody got signatures that read “To Bob, Best Wishes Always, Dustin Hoffman”……..most of these people got the before-mentioned chickenscratch signature…..but it was actual Dustin Hoffman chickenscratch…..

When you get a signed photo in the mail, your first instinct is to go online and search for other autographs from that same person so that you can compare yours with the other examples. Don’t freak out if they look a little different. Chances are, yours is real, just as most of the others are real. As I have said before, the only signatures that you will ever truly know with 100% certainty that are real are the ones that YOU personally witness the person signing. If your like me and you do not live in New York or LA where you trip over celebrities walking down the street everyday, you have to rely on faith. Faith that the autograph is real. If yours looks a little different, there might be a reason that you don’t know about which altered the signature. Maybe the star was rushing out the door and signed your photo in a hurry. Maybe yours was the last of hundreds that he/she had signed that day. Maybe the star had a baby elephant that it was teaching to hold a Sharpie and the animal actually signed your photo. You will never know.

You quickly learn to closely scrutinize the signature. Many stars have a very unique way of writing certain letters. You zoom in on those unique letters and most times you will happily find that your signature is indeed real. Let’s say though that you write to a star that always uses lower-case A’s in their signature in every example you have seen. If you get a signature that has upper-case A’s in the signature….you might have good reason to be suspicious.

Good Luck and enjoy this great hobby!!