The financial dimension of Cage’s collection—its relationship to his overall economic life—is distinctive in its extremity. Most collectors manage their collection in relation to their overall financial health; they acquire when they can afford to and may liquidate when they need to. Cage’s relationship to his collection was tangled with his more general spending patterns, which by most accounts reflected priorities other than financial optimization. The collection was part of a broader pattern of expenditure on things that mattered to him, financed by an extraordinary level of earning power, that eventually exceeded what that earning power could sustain.
The liquidation of Cage’s collection—which began before the theft, continued through the period of financial difficulty, and included the ultimate sale of Action Comics No. 1 after its recovery—represents the dissolution of a significant private collection assembled over a period of years. The individual items from that collection entered the market at different times and different prices, passing to new owners who may or may not have assembled them with the same intent. A collection, once dissolved, rarely reassembles.
What Cage preserved through the liquidation was the memory of having held, for a period, one of the most significant collections of Golden Age comics assembled by a private individual—and one object whose dramatic story of theft and recovery became a permanent part of its documented history. The provenance trail he created, by owning the copy of Action Comics No. 1 and having it stolen and recovered, attached his name to the object’s history as permanently as the names of Siegel and Shuster are attached to the character the object contains. Future owners of the book will own the Cage copy as surely as they own the Siegel and Shuster copy.