Manuscripts, books, magazines and comics need to be handled with gloves if they are to remain in mint condition because the oils and acids in your skin leave permanent marks on the pages.
How many valuable and rare publications made it all the way to today with that rating intact compared to the number
of duplicate publications, just as rare, but thumbed through by somebody and so deemed less valuable?
Well... what if you could definitively prove that that number three Spiderman comic that your cat peed on and didn't sell in your last garage sale was something Elvis Presley once thumbed through?
This is a bit of conjecture but I'd bet that the fingerprints of every corpse as of such-and-such a date which could be catalogued, have been catalogued, and so given the power of the freedom of information act...
Fry-Co proudly announces our Previous Fingerprint Ownership Authentication Database, or POFAD for short.
For a modest fee your totally 'insured for-current-value' document is shipped to our labs where each and every page of your precious document is digitized, analysed, and compared against our extensive database of stored human fingerprints.
We are currently working on methods to retrieve and catalogue fingerprints of historical figures based on quantum lithography... you probably haven't heard of it because we haven't worked all of the bugs out, but...
Who knows?
Maybe that moldy old copy of Hound Of The Baskervilles your Great Grandmother refused to part with and you don't know what to do with was once read by Charlie Chaplin.
That old movie poster might have once been held by one of the actors in the movie.
I don't know.
You don't know.
How much would you pay to find out?