The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card |
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The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card
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by Michael O'keeffe and Teri Thompson
Sales Rank: 119190
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List Price: $24.95
$16.47
At Amazon
on 6-20-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 256 pages
Published by: William Morrow May 22, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0061123927
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0061123924
Book Dimensions:
8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
Weighs: 7.2 ounces
Sports Illustrated.com
"Lively and well-researched."
Product Description
Since its limited release just after the turn of the twentieth century, this American Tobacco cigarette card has beguiled and bedeviled collectors. First identified as valuable in the 1930s, when the whole notion of card collecting was still young, the T206 Wagner has remained the big score for collectors who have scoured card shows, flea markets, estate sales, and auctions for the portrait of baseball's greatest shortstop.
Only a few dozen T206 Wagners are known to still exist. Most, with their creases, stains, and dog-eared corners, look worn and tattered, like they've been around for almost a century. But one—The Card—appears to have defied the travails of time. Thanks to its sharp corners and its crisp portrait of Honus Wagner, The Card has become the most famous and desired baseball card in the world.
Over the decades, as The Card has changed hands, its value has skyrocketed. It was initially sold for $25,000 by a small card shop in a nondescript strip mall. Years later, hockey great Wayne Gretzky bought it at the ageless Sotheby's auction house for $451,000. Then, more recently, it sold for $1.27 million on eBay. Today worth over $2 million, it has transformed a sleepy hobby into a billion-dollar industry that is at times as lawless as the Wild West. The Card has made men wealthy, certainly, but it has also poisoned lifelong friendships and is fraught with controversy—from its uncertain origins and the persistent questions about its provenance to the possibility that it is not exactly as it seems.
Now for the first time, award-winning investigative reporters Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson follow the trail of The Card from a Florida flea market to the hands of the world's most prominent collectors. They delve into a world of counterfeiters and con men and look at the people who profit from what used to be a kids' pastime, as they bring to light ongoing investigations into sports collectibles. O'Keeffe and Thompson also examine the life of the great Honus Wagner, a ballplayer whose accomplishments have been eclipsed by his trading card, and the strange and fascinating subculture of sports memorabilia and its amazing decline.
Intriguing and eye-opening, The Card is a ground-breaking look at a uniquely American hobby.
Reader Reviews
It is the most valuable piece of cardboard in the whole world: the T206 Honus Wagner PSA 8 NM-MT. It was printed in 1909 to be included in cigarettes from the American Tobacco Company, and shows a stiff and blocky young man with his hair parted in the middle, with a "Pittsburg" [sic] shirt buttoned all the way up. It isn't much to look at, but it was most recently sold to an anonymous collector for over two million dollars. This is all true, but also it is unbelievable; there must be something wrong here somewhere. And there is something wrong, all over the place in the world of sports collectibles, according to the story in _The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card_ (Morrow) by sports journalists and investigators Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson. You don't have to be interested in sports or collectibles to find this book amusing and enlightening, as it profiles collectors and their obsession with accumulation, and as it casts doubt on the integrity of many aspects of the enormous sport collectible market. The authors admit that "Wagner's baseball card seems to have become more significant to twenty-first century baseball fans than Wagner himself." That's really too bad, for Wagner was a fine baseball player, inviting comparison with Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, both of whom were selected with Wagner as inaugural entries into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. Cigarette companies in the 1880s started putting them into packs of ten cigarettes. Honus Wagner is the rarest card of the 1909 - 1911 set produced by the American Tobacco Company; There are around fifty of Honus Wagner's cards, each of them valuable, but most in poor condition. _The Card_ is about the one known as The Card, the one that is in superb condition; it has bright colors, its edges are clean and white, and the corners are sharp enough to draw blood. And that's the problem; The Card is, in the view of many, just in too good condition. There is a great peculiarity of the baseball card obsession: retouching or repairing a card is forbidden, or if not forbidden, it takes almost all the value of the card away. You can refinish antiques, and even the greatest Old Master paintings get retouched and no one minds as long as the work is done well; but baseball cards must not be doctored. And there are baseball card doctors who remove stains, smooth out wrinkles, build up flabby corners with wheat paste, and scalpel or laser rough edges to make the remaining ones sharp. There are serious doubts about the authenticity of The Card, explored at length here. The Card is now all sealed up in a special case, and no owner is likely to open it up to let appraisers reevaluate it. It isn't just The Card that has authentication problems. Other cards do, and other sports hardware does; even bats, balls, and mitts that are authenticated by their previous owners as having been used in important games may not be the actual equipment as claimed. There are authentication services that for a fee will grade cards, but like any company, they want to please their best customers and are inclined to look favorably on cards from their favorites. Sometimes the services that do the authentication are also the ones that own the property and are auctioning it. Sometimes there are shills in the auctions to make the price go sky high. There is little policing by dealers, the authentication services, or governmental authorities. What used to be a fun hobby for kids has outgrown kids and has become a playground for rich fraudsters. The authors have hopes for the hobby, and there are those who are pushing for reform. There are some honest brokers profiled here, and maybe they will eventually have their way, but it hasn't happened yet. _The Card_, a brightly written and entertaining look at a unique realm of folly, reminds us that baseball may nominally be the national pastime, but the actual one is making a buck any way one can.
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The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card
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Price: $16.47
Updated on 6-20-2008.
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