The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card

The Card was a very fun and easy read. It has great incites into the world of card collecting and collecting in general. My favorite part is the way the authors weave not only baseball history but American history as well throughout the book. I recommend this book to anyone interested in baseball and especially card collecting. It made me want to rifle through my sons shoe boxes of cards in hunt for that Honus Wagner!

Authors Michael O'Keefe and Teri Thompson tell an interesting and entertaining story about "The Card"--the most valuable Honus Wagner T206 card as well as the card collecting and sports memorabilia "hobby." The Wagner card sold for $2.35 million in February 2007. It is, as the authors write, "the symbol of a hobby out of control." As one prominent collector said, "Too much of this hobby's driven by greed." The authors chronicle the transformation of the hobby into a $2 billion a year, Internet-driven business, which attracts more than its share of unsavory characters. While slightly familiar with the Gretzky Wagner T206 card (so named because hockey great Wayne Gretzky and a partner once purchased it), I had no idea about its history and the controversy that surrounds it. The authors present a strong case that the card was actually cut from a sheet of cards, trimmed and altered. If this is the case, the value of the card should have been drastically reduced. It seems, however, that too many people have too much to lose, if it was actually proven. "The Card" is an intriguing story that will keep you turning the pages. Kudos to the authors for also providing a couple chapters on the career and post-career of Pittsburgh Pirates great Honus Wagner, one of the five original inductees in the Hall of Fame.

My goodness! The world has certainly changed a lot since I was a kid growing up in the late 50's and early 60's. Back then it seemed that just about every boy in elementary school and junior high collected baseball cards. Not a one of us had any idea that one day many of these cards would be worth a kings ransom. We pitched them in the schoolyard, traded them with our friends and stuck them in our spokes to make our modest Columbia or Schwinn bicycles sound something akin to a motorcycle. Then in the early 1980's all of this seemed to change. Now collecting and selling baseball cards was big business. A host of new card companies got into the fray and thousands of card shops opened across the country. The price of vintage cards skyrocketed and the 12 year olds who used to collect baseball cards simply for pleasure were now wheeling and dealing at their own stands at flea markets. So what had happened to cause the dramatic shift in this venerable hobby? Michael O' Keeffe and Teri Thompson have come up with a splendid history of baseball card collecting in their marvelous new book "The Card". Spotlighting the "Holy Grail" of baseball cards, the T206 Honus Wagner card issued by the American Tobacco Company in 1909, "The Card" offers a fascinating look at a hobby that so many Americans fondly recall from their youth. This is an important piece of Americana that really needed to be told. In "The Card" O'Keeffe and Thompson document the origins of baseball cards. I was surprised to learn that the first baseball cards appeared sometime in the 1860's even before the formation of the National League. However, it was in the early part of the 20th century that baseball cards began to appear as a premium with a whole host of products. Baseball cards were packed with cigarettes, candy and gum and ice cream. But it was not until 1952 that Topps decided to sell baseball cards in packs. It was this development more than any other that made the buying and trading of baseball cards such an important and enjoyable hobby among youths of that era. Fast forward now to the early 1980's. A number of new players began producing baseball cards including Fleer, Donruss and Upper Deck. All of a sudden it was fashionable to buy and trade baseball cards. And what's more lots of adults figured out that there was a ton of money to be made in old cards. A new industry sprung up virtually overnight. In "The Card" Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson introduce us to some of the key players in this new business. Some of those you will meet are extremely honest while far too many others have rather unsavory reputations. Readers will also learn about how valuable cards are graded and authenticated and why the term "buyer beware" should be uppermost in the minds of those purchasing such items. It turns out that there are myriad ways to alter a baseball card. I must tell you that "The Card" held my interest from cover to cover. I fondly recall the days of my youth w

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 claime

This book was so much fun! I didn't know much about baseball or the hobby/big business of sports collectibles, and I learned a lot. Thompson and O'Keeffe vividly recreate the era when Honus Wagner played ball, when baseball cards came with tobacco, not bubble gum, then track the most valuable card in baseball and ask: Is it real? Did you know that opium and heroin were legal and available over the counter in 1900, even while some people were denouncing tobacco? I recommend this for Father's Day (but read it before you give it to him).