T206 Scrapbook on Ebay
 

http://cgi.ebay.com/T206-BASEBALL-CA...item2a10296c87

Funny how even though he knows nothing about cards, it's all he's been selling for the last week or so, and he manages to mention Wagner, Doyle, Magee, etc.

Also funny how the old turn of the century guy took time to trim down the sides to a near normal look.

Bidding is up to 2.2K Who's sniping?

Hadn't spotted this yet. A lot of desirable cards in there...trimmed or not.

Seller's feedback looks bad, but the book looks good...real good.


Rob

I missed this one, too. Not sure how. Cool scrapbook.

I'm having a hard time seeing any card not trimmed. It's almost like the guy had OCD and had to trim every single cards - cut off the borders or clip the corners - even when the card would have fit fine without it.

Agreed. Cool scrapbook.
Bunch of Mono's, Wagner's and Cobbs. And a Weaver. And a few others.

Quite a scrapbook. Love to run into one at a garage sale sometime.

Seems sketchy. Not for me.

Neat item, but what an awesome collection that was before they let Junior play with scissors! Looks like there are quite a number of "homemade" cards mixed in, but it is a strange mix of cards from Obaks, Zeenuts, Mono's all the way to T206, E90-1/2, and M101-4/5. Even at that price it's only a few bucks a card but that sure would have been killer to find them before they were dessimated to get them int the album.

In the third photo there's a card between Purtell and Smith that I don't recognize. Is it a T217? But trimmed or not, that's a big time album.

hard to tell, but I'll bet they may also be skinned. That wouldn't be logical, as the process normally happens as the cards come OUT of an album, but they look really flat. Even at a few bucks a card, I won't be playing.

Cicotte is written underneath the card and looks like the same pose as his Boston Store etc. not sure what it is though.

Just a heads up... This is the same seller that offered up some questionable awards that were discussed on the memorabilia side.

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthr...ruth+mvp+award

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthr...t=Gehrig+award

For what it's worth...

I was also looking at that Cicotte card. Not really sure what it is but it looks cool. He also has 2 Obak Weavers and a Gandil.

Some rare cards in there, T217s etc. I also agree that many looked skinned as they are to thin looking on the page to me.

The seller lost Z$$ by only mentioning the common and almost worthless low value T206's he should have researched it more and included T217, E99, T212-1 etc. in the listing.

I smell pictures of cards that are glued into a scrapbook that has been made to look old.

Me too...this seller is a known scammer.

Sellers states that you can pick up in Nashville and lists his hometown as Hendersonville. I live in Hendersonville. If there is anyone worried about bidding I'll email the seller to see if I can meet him in a public place to check the album out.

Emailed seller. Directed him to this site and asked to see if I could give the scrapbook a once over in a public place.

Thanks Mike. I believe the cards are real but the condition of them is abysmal.

I agree most look way to thin, also it looks like there is a lot of gloss to the cards, as you can see with the flash glare.

"I THINK SOME ARE DOVER"

Nuf ced!

Yep!

I Don't Buy It
 

I started to respond to this thread this morning, but had to leave for the afternoon.

I was going to list all the reasons why this isn't real and I feel it's fairly obvious. I copied my post before I deleted it, just for reflection later.

I am quite shocked that so many people believe this is real. People that know more than I do, people that I have learned from.

Since this seller has been invited here to comment, I'm going to hold back on my "observations" until they have their say.

I think there may be one area where I have more experience than you astute collectors.

I was trying to look closely, and where it appears that the corners are cut off, there are actually "homemade" slits in the album pages that the corners of the cards are tucked into. At least that is how it looks to me.......you can see on some of the PCL cards where it looks "raised" where the corners are.

*Edit to add* I'll use the word cards lightly...as others have mentioned, they look very thin, and it's too odd that most of the T206's have the wording at the bottom cut off,,,amongst other things :rolleyes:

yes it makes perfect sense for someone to sell a massive album of rare cards from somone directly involved with MLB on Ebay for a fraction of it's real value. what a swell seller

Im surprised at how many of you think these ARE NOT Authentic...

The wear alone should prove theyre all authentic, let alone that 75% of the cards pictured have never been reprinted. ie the Zeenuts (1911-17), D310, T212-1, T212-2, T212-3, T217, E90-2, E99, E100, etc., and the only cards that have been reprint (T206), easily pass as authentic.

The camera glare on some cards is because those cards have a glossy surface, ie the M101-4/5, T212-2, T212-3, etc.

Only a handful of the cards would have any value if removed, ie the 3 Wagners, 3 Weavers, 3 Cobbs, the E90-2, T217, some of the T212-1s, and maybe a couple of the Youngs and Mathewsons... the rest are $3-$10 cards at best. These cards lost 99.5% of their value when Junior used the scissors on them, not the glue.

Gotta agree w/Frank...these cards are definitely real...just in terrible shape. This and the fact that the seller has bad feedback will prevent me from interest in this lot. Lots of interesting looking cards in there, though...some of which I've never seen before.

Well.......
 

Well, those of us that were interested in bidding would prefer that momentum swayed against the belief that they are authentic.

<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5uecapxuY-k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

there was a seller in Florida in 2007 that made great looking Obak reprints on thicker card stock. He sold tons of them to unsuspecting collectors. The Cesar's Creek flea market where I live has sellers that have reprints of just about everything you can imagine. I have seen the Zeenut Weaver card reprinted and I also bought one of the green background cards that shows Weaver with his team the San Francisco seals ( I can't remember the ACC designation maybe E100). this was hand made from some guys printer no doubt, but it was cool looking at the time, and I knew I would never be able to buy a real version of that card. So yes, though many of these cards have not been "officially" reprinted, there are still home made versions that some will make to look old and try to sell.
Remember that old Brady Bunch episode ...."Caveat emptor" :)

T206 scrapbook
 

item has been removed??

Scrapbook
 

Dick, Book is still up on e-bay. This would be right up your alley, LOL... TTYS Old Friend Ralph

Steve,

Thanks for offering the seller the opportunity to meet you live! I guess that I have the following thoughts on the matter.

I can't really tell whether the cards are real or not - although they do seem skinned at a minimum. If the seller is willing to be allow a knowledgeable person to inspect the book in person....then I would be much more willing to bid - provided that the inspector believes they are real.

If not, then that's cool - it's the seller's choice but I will not bid in that instance and I suppose that many others would not as well.

-S

Why now? Is it your auction? Why this why now?? I guess i won't be able to win it now. So much for me bidding.

I thought there was a board rule not to out auctions here?

I guess that only applies to me.

Dan my friend
 

Dan- there is no rule and has never been a rule against outing auctions, at least in the last 7 yrs or so, and I don't know about before that.

Most members and myself hope they don't get outed but there just can't be a rule against it. Believe me, there have been a few times in the past when I was just sick about something being outed especially as it was in a different category and I wanted to bid badly. I got outbid on that item but the rule remains the same as it has always been. There is no rule against it. Never was and never will be. We have had several discussions about it on the board. Hope this explains that part of it. regards

Does nobody seem alarmed that this seller wrote the word "Dover" in his auction description? That he found Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig's MVP awards in an antique shop two months ago? The fact that all of these cards appear too thin?

I thought it was Babe Dover Ruth and Lou Dover Gehrig, no?

Matt Foley!!! Had a friend post that Matt Foley Yapper clip on my Facebook page. Pretty sure they were trying tell me something...:D:D:D

The fact that the seller said "dover" in the description is of concern to me.

I wouldn't be a bidder on such an item regardless but I am very curious about this book as there appear to be a bunch of cards...kinda muted in color...some with borders that I've never seen before?!

Some of the names are also incorrect...ie. Jackson for Buster Brown I believe...e90-1.

The combination of period articles and the sheer variety of cards along with the time it must have taken to create this book leads me to conclude it is most likely authentic.

But personally I have little interest in butchered cards such as these...

could be...
 

The book could easily be a mix of reprints and real cards. It's not like we haven't seen that scenario a dozen times. regards

The album looks old, so perhaps somebody added some Dover reprints to the genuine cards that were already pasted in. Most of the cards look dead on original, then there are others that don't even look like cards at all. It might be a mix of real and fake.

The seller emailed me and sent a photo/card of the orginal owner of the scrap book who was involved in baseball...the owner is still alive and somewhere in the NY area.:)

http://photos.imageevent.com/piojohn...o%20sloate.jpg

Wow. A new Mayo

Now that Mayo is an absolute fake!

Some of the cards look real and some don't - but the DESCRIPTION is very SCARY!

Sloate? Wasn't he a reliever best known for correcting his teammate's spelling errors?

No word from the guy yet. I doubt he will email me back. Worth a shot though. Best of luck to those daring enough to bid.

Well, with 20 hours left, this is at 3100. It does look like a great deal of work went into this, but I fear someone is going to get burned when the only real cards turn out to be the T206 beaters. The first thing that bothers me is the pencil captioning. If these are players of "yore" or "yesteryear", that implies that the T212's. T206's, etc were old when the album was put together. That doesn't mesh with the purported age of the album itself. Those down home sentiments are also pretty funny when talking about the Cardinals - yeah, the doorstops of the 1900's NL were much better than the Gashouse Gang or Musial, Slaughter, Gibson, Brock, etc...
It is also convenient that despite all the apparent use this album has seen, only one card has separated from the page - a beater Sweet Cap T206. Not one rare card/HOFer has come loose. Glue technology must have been something back in the the day (of yore).
My guess is that this was put together by someone who was carefully trying to reproduce what he felt a collection of cards would have looked like circa 1910-15, HOF players and all, but was smart enough not to put a T206 Wagner in this mix. I also am amused by the question posted about the calue of the Mono cards. If I am correct, referencing the other sets in the question will trigger a hit on a Title and Description search. How about that- wow, what a thoughtful question. Thanks.
I think the seller has a previously unknown Vermeer for auction also :)

In one of the pictures there are some cleveland players and above them it is written "Cleveland's Indians never won a ... but Addie Joss kept them up there"

Tells me that it was put together much later and the story about the owner being involved in baseball is crap.

Joss died in 1911 and the Naps weren't renamed the Indians until 1915 when Lajoie went back to Philadelphia.

Anybody that involved in baseball and baseball card collecting would have known that.

I'm beginning to think you guys may be right...that this is a modern day concoction of xerox copies with a few commons thrown in...I'm sure paypal will save the day on this one!

Really Real
 

I'll go on record as saying that the book is legitimate.

The cards don't look too thin to me.

The seller recently sold an interesting signed Bender item:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=180642521529

The bad feedback appears to be mostly communication/shipping problems.

The seller is also selling a signed Cy Young ball, that has been GAI authenticated:

http://cgi.ebay.com/SINGLE-SIGNED-RA...item2a1054a517

If you look in the picture of the Young ball, you'll see an auction description about how this came from the collection of some dude who put it together in the 1920s or 1930s. The scrapbook was probably put together around that time -- obviously a lot of wear and tear to those cards before they were put into the scrapbook.

Neat old book. Would love to have it. But wouldn't pay more than $1,000 for it....

like I said in a prior post. I see these types of "albums" all the time at the flea markets and antique stores in southern ohio. The posting of the question by an anonymous ebayer was hilarious. I like the "threat" of cancelling your bids at the bottom of the page. I'm still waiting for a bidder with low or private feedback to start really bidding this item up tonight. I'm sure this seller has all his friends and relatives that shill for him ready to roll . As for PAYPAL saving the day....I hope so, but a new trick by unscrupulous sellers is to set up several bank accounts with PAYPAL. they simply cancel the account immediately after the high dollar fraudulaent auction ends and switch over to a new PAYPAL/bank account and new Ebay name. I know sellers that have tables at the saturday monthly shows in Dayton and Cincy that have more than 5 Ebay accounts that they use to buy and sell from. their wives and sons and daughters also have multiple accpunts that they can use too. It's pretty sad, but it is happening everyday on ebay folks and they cannot really police it.

There are certainly a couple of red flags, but I think it's real. The scrapbook has clippings dating to 1932, when John McGraw left the Giants, another referencing something about Earl Averill in 1930, and a photo of a mature Babe Ruth. Pasted on the same page as the McGraw article are a couple of T206 Giants, suggesting that maybe the whole book was put together in 1932, in which case days of yore might certainly apply to cards issued 20 years prior.

What I find very telling is the trimmed m101 card of Wally Schang. These cards are pretty meticulously organized by team, and there is the Wally Schang card (the pose that appears in about a dozen sets) smack dab in the middle of several Detroit Tigers. Schang only played for the Tigers during one season--1931--and the m101 card has him on the A's. So someone ignored the card's caption, trimmed it and just randomly placed it among the Tigers? I doubt it. Seems like alot of homework for a modern-day scammer to go through on such an obscure and minor detail. BTW, the same can be said for the m101-4 Clarence Walker card, which would declare him to be on the Red Sox but which was trimmed and pasted among the St. Louis Browns, where Walker had played previously. This and the fact that there are many out of the ordinary cards (Minos and Zeenuts) leads me to buy into the seller's claim that these are real, albeit damaged cards.

+1. I was trying to write a very similar reply last night but couldn't get the words out. You said it much better than I. Some kid put this together in the 30s which is why the tobacco cards are all creased etc. All cards have similar hack job and it's just too consistent to be a whole cloth fake.

Went for a healthy price.

Edited to add: If a board member got it, I would pay a healthy price for one particular card.

Somebody got some killer uncataloged cards! I finished 3rd. BUMMER! :(

some great cards for the winner !!

wow...healthy price...some great cards...and a lot of crap too!

I'm just wondering- if he said in his listing "I think some are Dover?", and just say a few of them were, when would those have been inserted into this book? And, would they have the same pencil writing around them? :confused:

I Think It's a Fake
 

I'm more of a t206 only guy and I don't know the true scarcity of some of the cards listed but somethings are not right. Like the seller's feedback - too many from the same ID and too many ID's having minimal feedback. Also there looked like many bids from ID's that have very little feedback (a newbie to Ebay all of a sudden wants to spend thousand$ on vintage cards?).

lastly - and someone may have made this point earlier - why were all the cards trimmed? Isn't that a perfect way to equalize everything? Get a stack of reprints and trim away the perforations, etc.

I just don't see someone who seems like a dishonest seller to begin with, miraculously acquiring a gem of a scrapbook.

Of course the worst part is this conversation even has to take place.

I do hope it's real, and that the buyer is happy.

peter

I'm at work, and can't see ebay but am very curious about what the final price was. Can someone post it?!? I am too impatient to wait until I get home!

BTW - I love the discussion of this auction. I found it very early, and was greatly intrigued. Too much of a risk for me though! I too was scared off by the glare, but thought some more and thought that if the seller was intuitive enough to bend the pages on the right side, weather the book, use flat-leaded (those markings are NOT graphite) pencils that they had back in the day - than they would have been intelligent enough to eliminate the glare on many of the cards. And plus, I do know that some of those cards had some type of glossy finish.

Also, that Wagner looks 100% authentic, and not too thinned at all.

I believe the Dover comment was added after the seller was informed of this site. He obviously has no idea what the Dover reference means.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the cards are genuine, they are so mangled that I do not see wanting to own any of them. Since I would not be happy with any of them in my collection, I would not buy the album except as a novelty for a few bucks, so $10,000 for it...I can think of a lot of other stuff I'd rather have...

$10,200

Thank you Scott. Wow, what a price.....

Im looking forward to hearing more about this once the book is received and viewed by the owner.And also if any of these cards will be third party authenticated graded and come into the hobby for sale.Jason

Stupidly staring as always
 

I am one of the believers (and lower bidders) on this auction. I felt they were authentic, based upon years of stupidly staring at similiar cards. Some of them may be skinned, which would be a bummer for the winning bidder.

Also, I don't know what to make of the unknown cards. I lean toward that they were clippings that were later colored in, so not really cards at all. It would be interesting to find out the results of their removal as well as the rest of the cards. Still way too much for this lot because of all the severe trimming.

Brian

Wow, absolutely crazy price for that thing! Dan, I'm willing to bet those "uncataloged" cards are simply homemade, the original owner apparently had a love affair with his scissors. So many better ways (in my mind at least) to spend that kind of coin. I have a hard time thinking there is much meat left on the bone if the seller decides to break it up and soak them.
-Rhett

Neither do I. Can someone explain? I may have missed it earlier in the thread.

Dover made books of reprint cards in the 1970-80s.

Glue, Scissors, and Skinning
 

I thought that those cards (Cicotte, et al) were homemade as well. Perhaps even some e135 cutouts and then reglued to cardboard. If it was a scam, it was one of the most sophisticated scams I have seen. To have some highly desirable cards (even cards that are not commonly recognized) mixed in with more commonly seen stuff and then not mention those desirable cards would be exceedingly brilliant for a scammer.

Re: Dover
 

They're horrible and wouldn't trick anybody on this board.

That is my theory, that someone (maybe more than one someone) spent a lot of time and research to scam an unwitting collector. If my theory is correct, they didn't make out nearly as well as they had hoped and may have won their own item.
Until someone on this board (not a first time poster), shows proof that they got past the 5 day money back period, I will continue to believe that this was a well orchestrated scam. I was going to point out some other irregularities in this auction, but I didn't want to give the next scammer any more info. After all, this is where you can come to find out what not to do in a scam. It's getting f*ing ridicules!:eek:

If the winner wants to sell me this page, I'm interested.

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/7209/detroitn.jpg

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/1343/picture2gd.jpg

wow, thats $8K more that I would have paid :) and 2X more than I thought anyone would have paid, ....... over $12 a card with many of them being 2/3rds of a whole card at best.
Besides removing the 3 Wagners, 3 Weavers and 3 Cobbs,and the chopped T212-1, E90-2, T217's and trying to get some $$ for them, I dont see many cards actually worth more than a couple $$. then you have all those homemade cards too.

Winner should keep 90% of the album intact and keep it for its history, if you try to remove these pieces of cards and flip them, Id think it would be hard to break even on this piece.

Moriarty
 

I too am shocked at the final price. Anything above $5k was a major gamble.

There are some cool uncataloged cards in there, if they are real. See Moriarty in picture in the post above. There were about 15 cards from a series I've never seen before, such as Cicotte, James, Gowdy, Adair, and others. Very cool? Can anybody identify the issue?

Maybe they were cut from a scorebook or magazine article?

Lol
 

I'm in tears laughing at this :-)

BTW - love one of his eBay negative responses with "DUKE IS A D-CK"

Please forgive my ignorance, but there are references in Frank's post and the listing to E100s and E99s. I only see one E100 and no E99s. Can someone please point out the others to me?

So much for needing good feedback to sell a high ticket item.

Here is the buyer: annawoogie (537)

Someone want to let them know that some of the cards might be bogus?

I don't see where annawoogie has bought or sold ANY sports related items recently. However, I did see where they bought a portable black light for $9.99.

I hope they are going to put that black light to good use on these cards....

David

It's under the black light. LOL! Looks like they bought the black light right after winning the scam book.

I was fortunate enough to acquire a similar scrapbook, but with more newspaper clippings and only T206's. Paul Fusco, whom I'm sure you all know in the hobby, was the gentleman whom I acquired it from. To this day it's still one of my most prized possessions in my collection.

However, the one thing I noticed about mine as opposed to this one is the condition of the cards. The cards in my scrapbook are in amazing condition, only that they're glued. If this was a period-assembled book, the cards might still be trimmed due to a hyper kid. But they all wouldn't look that mangled!

It's a tough call. But I love my scrapbook and I'll never destroy it to salvage the cards. And I know if I was the winner of this book, I'd leave it as/is.