Whale Tales and Epic Sales
Recently published on Sports Collectors Daily:
"Is it still worth going to estate sales to see if anything awesome turns up? It was for one collector who purchased a box full of hundreds of vintage postcards for $400. Inside were eight postcards from the rare 1914 Lawrence Semon issue, including Ty Cobb. In all, the collection sold [in Heritage] for $50,370."
Yeah, baby!
We all have stories, and we’ve all heard them, right? The scores we’ve made, the almost deals that got away, the items that were not quite as we hoped when we got there, and so on. Picking is the stuff dreams are made of; the thrill of the hunt makes all of us collectors a bit bonkers when we see a dusty box of cards in the corner at a garage sale, even if it turns out to be filled with 1991 Pro Set football when we finally get a look at it. In 50 years of collecting, I’ve had more than my share of hits, near hits, screw-ups, and ones that got away. I thought I would share some of them. If people like it, I will put together more later.
The story that started me on this article wasn’t the Lawrence Semon postcards but it too doesn’t involve me. I was at an antique show talking with a dealer and he mentioned a Babe Ruth card that Goldin sold for over $50,000. He said the consignor found the card raw at that show in May, bought it from the clueless seller for $25, had it graded, and consigned to Goldin. I don't know if the origin story is true, but there was a Goldin sale of a matching card late last year. I checked. If the story is true, I am horrified. I go to that show all the time except I missed one last year, when I went on vacation...no doubt, the show where the card showed up. Damn it, that card was supposed to be mine!
My first missed big fish story came from an incident when I was just 10 years old. I nearly bagged a T206 Honus Wagner in 1975. Seriously. My parents were half-assed antique fans: they liked antiques but didn’t do much in the way of learning about them, instead relying on dealers in New York City. They befriended and were befriended by a couple who ran a small antiques store on 2nd Avenue in Yorkville. Well, it soon came out that I was a hardcore card freak. They told me that on their last swing through the South, they had seen a dealer in a town with a bag of cigarette cards and they would pick it up for me next month. I was bonkers with anticipation. When they got home, sorry, the dealer had recently sold the cards. Years later I read a story in an old magazine (The Trader Speaks, maybe) about a bag of ciggie cards sold in that town at the time with-you guessed it-a T206 Wagner. D’oh!
One of the best scores I ever made came from just standing around at a show. A guy showed up with a box of 1952 and 1954 Topps cards from his childhood that he wanted to sell. He was asking low Beckett. In the bad old analog days, Beckett published a monthly price guide with high price and low price columns for each card, so asking a dealer for low Beckett was kind of a convention. After a dealer told him no, I approached and asked if I could look. I picked out several cards including a 1952 Spahn that later graded a PSA 8, and paid him well, about 10% over low Beckett. He was happy and I arranged for the seller to come to my office the next day. I bought a hell of a lot of the other cards—anything without a crease—and they were really pristine. PSA 8s and 9s all the way once I graded them. Needless to say, I was thrilled with the flip on that deal.
I love being on the dealer side of the table because it gets me first looks at the stuff people want to sell. I was working a table at a show and a seller walked in with a spectacular 1956 World Series photo. The seller was tough. He knew he had a great piece and he pushed hard for it. I even passed on a rare Brooklyn Dodgers publication he offered me because he wanted a lot, and I am just not well-versed in the field enough to throw cash at it. That was probably my mistake. That photo, though…man, it was just beautiful. It was just so mesmerizing that I took the plunge. I sold it for a huge multiple at auction later that year. I am not sure who was more shocked, the auctioneer or me; I was just hoping to cash out quickly and double my money.
Sometimes a big fish lands because I saw something nobody else did, which is so much fun. I picked up a boxing postcard on eBay from a seller in Spain that depicted Young Perez, a world champion bantamweight fighter in the 1930s who was a Tunisian Jew based in France. He was a Jewish boxer who was sent to Auschwitz in WWII and forced to fight gladiatorial fights for the entertainment of the guards. He was matched hundreds of times with fighters as big as heavyweights. The small Perez won every fight at the highest stakes: they murdered the losers. He was murdered on a death march near the end of the war after sharing food with another prisoner in violation of the rules. Perez signatures are rare. I noticed that the PC had a signature on the back. The seller did not even mention it in the description. I did my research on the signature and it was genuine.
On occasion I find myself staring at something that the seller knows about but does not fully understand. Good chance to work on my poker face. That was certainly the case when I found an original photo by Alfred Noyer, a photographer in Paris about 100 years ago. His “AN Paris” logo is a fixture on boxing postcards of the era, especially a series he did of French HOF boxer Georges Carpentier. I was at a show, and I came across a large format Noyer signed image of Carpentier, something I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since. It is one of the nicest photos in my collection.
One of the oddest situations I ever faced had nothing to do with the cards themselves. I found a guy at a paper fair with tons of stuff, including a shoebox of nonsports cards. These ranged from late 19th century N cards to T cards to 1980s Topps movie cards. About half the box was N and T cards. I could see that I wanted most of the box, so I just offered to buy it all. I had a price in mind. The guy freaked out. He started babbling about how hard that would be to do and couldn’t I just pick the cards I wanted, and he would price them. That was a first: being asked to cherry-pick. So I did. I passed on all the 1970s-1980s common stuff and pulled the rest. He got then hung up on selling some Beatles cards, so I put those back in the box too. He calmed down and offered to sell the rest to me for a fraction of what I would have offered on the whole box, even though what I pulled was at least 75% of the value of the box. I later realized he was a hoarder, and while he could sell some cards from the box, the idea of parting with the box itself, or all the cards in it, was something he just could not handle. As for the cards I did get, one card in the pile I picked was worth more than the entire price he asked, which is why I had a substantially higher number in mind as my limit for the entire box.
I was recently asked to cherry pick again. A dealer at an antique show I’ve bought from before said to me “hey, you’re the sports guy” and asked if I wanted to look at a card collection he’d just purchased. Yes, please. It was dreck, lots of shiny crap, but I saw a sheet of basketball cards with two LeBron James rookies. I offered to buy it all, but he was adamant that it was $3 a card even for the cards that were worth a nickel at best. I verified it was a flat $3 each card, pulled the James RCs, and paid up. Hey, he asked me to…
Another out of my wheelhouse deal: I found a box of photos that turned out to be a sportswriter’s archive of press photos from the 1960s. I pulled one hell of a stack of stuff, even though I really wasn’t interested in or well-versed in photographs or in some of the subjects. Turned out he had some great Type I photos in there, including what I later determined were rookie era Type I action photos of Wilt Chamberlain against Bill Russell taken by Philadelphia photographer John W. Mosley. Kept those…
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I’d be remiss for the week if I did not mention that Fanatics decided, after a year of struggling with it, to ditch the PWCC name and rebrand what they acquired into Fanatics Collectibles. I guess they couldn’t get the foul smell out of the PWCC name. I don’t blame them for trying, though: You don’t always have to throw away your sneakers just because you stepped in dog doo.