Don... Classic TV puts to shame most, not all, of the MINDLESS pap that serves as entertainment on TV today.. 
.... As to Gold edged decks... I agree that they are very durable if done right. I collect Pre-1930 decks and approx 60% of the decks in my collection are Gold edged. Of course the process was a lot cheaper to do back then, as opposed to today which i find quite prohibitive as far as collecting goes... Unless one has the $$$ to burn & a very quick Kickstarter Finger.. 
Not ALL classic TV is as good as you remember it, trust me... And I was referring to the advertisements, which were even worse! There were some great shows, to be sure, but there were some serious clunkers, as well. You don't remember them as well because many of them never made it into syndication - in television, there's something called the "golden number" - it's the minimum number of episodes needed for a show to make it into syndication for local TV stations. That minimum number is 65, allowing a local station to broadcast it five times a week for at least 13 weeks. If a show didn't run for three seasons (back when a season meant approximately 26 episodes, plus or minus a few), it never made it into syndication on local stations. In today's market, with so many cable network channels to fill with programming, it's a little easier to syndicate a shorter show, but the demand's still not very high, especially when a show is bad enough.
I've seen a few photos of the gilding process. Peter takes little flakes of gold that are so light, they float in the air when released from his tweezers, and glues them to the edge of a deck being held in a vise. They have to be applied very carefully - a single wrong move ruins an entire deck and wastes some very expensive 23.5k gold foil. That's part of the expense, right there - he's not using a gold look-alike, he's using nearly-pure gold. It's a highly labor-intensive process. Even back in the day, I don't think it was as difficult as the process he uses - there's no way they would have been produced in the numbers that they were, not without hiring an army of gilders.
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