Fun Purchase-Barry Halper 1999 Auction Books
 

I purchased a few items (financing/letters) this year related to the Ruth sale to the Yankees that originally came from the Barry Halper auction in 1999. To provide some more background information I bought the auction catalogs from the 1999 auction via eBay. An added bonus it had a printout of each lot and the final sales prices. This may be the best $4.99 plus shipping I ever spent plus it came with two baseball hardcover books as an added bonus.

Fun to read through the write ups and background info (and compare costs).

Where did he keep all those items, wow!

Did any of you attend the auction?

If you prefer memorabilia over cards, it was one of the greatest auctions ever held... perhaps the greatest. Such a shame that in retrospect, a few bogus/forged high-profile items (less than one quarter of 1% of the offered lots) tainted the entire auction for many people.

Aside from Ty Cobb's fake dentures and Joe Jackson's fabricated jersey, the vast majority of Halper's offerings were spectacular with many being one-of-a-kind. It is widely believed that Halper was not even aware of the few "bad items". According to those who knew him, he was guilty of wishful thinking which led to his gullibility. He was just too trusting of those looking to take advantage of his wealth and willingness to spend.

That said, there is no better read than those Catalogs if you have around 6 hours to kill. I read through them on a coast-to-coast flight while my wife made it through 3 full-length movies. She told me she was drooling over Brad Pitt while I drooled at nerd porn.

For the amount of items in his collection if a few items were not authentic that is a pretty good batting average.

At some point, in the ‘80s I think it was, there was an article in Smithsonian magazine about his collection. That article and accompanying photos, mainly of so many items displayed in his basement IIRC, really stoked my enthusiasm for non-card baseball memorabilia.

well
 

shameless plug - I have a SIGNED copy with prices realized. I figure 50$ and free ship. I PAID 125.00 and won but a single item :-) Likely to be on feeBay next week and/or BST...

Great memory. Yep, it was in the April, 1987 issue of Smithsonian entitled One Fan's Tribute to Baseball Greats - And Almost Greats. It was written by Robert Creamer. I have a copy in the Glove Library of the site and can e-mail it if anyone wants it.

JD
www. baseballglovecollector.com

You can see his collection on You Tube. This video was originally on VHS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG01x2TL_JE

Agreed. Well said.

I was at the sale, it was monumental. I also have (and cherish) the catalogs.

Jamie's post and the responses made me pull my Haper Auction Catalogue's out and look at them for the 1st time in several years. No doubt, one of the best two hours spent in a while looking at arguably the greatest collection ever assembled in the hobby.

At the time, prices seemed to be moon money, but they look cheap compared to the current values of many of the items that have resurfaced through the years. Just sayin' ;):cool:

Jamie's post and the responses made me pull my Haper Auction catalogues out and look at them for the 1st time in several years.
No doubt, one of the best two hours spent in a while looking at arguably the greatest collection ever assembled in the hobby.

At the time, prices seemed to be moon money, but they look cheap compared to the current values of many of the items that have resurfaced through the years.
Just sayin' ;):cool:

It is a cool book and for $5 is a steal price...

perezfan - Im curious on why you think such a low % of fake/forged items...I just follow a very narrow field (1919 World Series) and the lot of signed baseballs of the 8 men out and the Joe Jackson jersey were all forged (save for the Cicotte ball maybe)...even though REA recently sold some of those baseballs which makes me wonder how they passed JSA this time around...so just in that narrow field two high value lots were fake

Well, if you look at the thickness of those two Catalogs (and then add in the hundreds of lower-valued internet-only lots that followed the live auction) you have a huge "base" to draw from. My guess is that Halper was duped by whoever sold him the 1919-related items you referenced, as that's a pretty unique niche.

Another niche that was tainted were the Al Stump/Ty Cobb items... like Cobb's Diaries, his Dentures and the Shotgun Cobb's mother presumably used to kill his father. Common sense should've prevailed on those items, but I believe Halper's wishful thinking got in the way of any logic.

So he had a few bad sources and people who were looking to exploit his fat wallet. If, however you leaf through the catalogs and add-in all of the internet lots and the thousands of cards he had, you'll see the vast majority of items were authentic. It's just unfortunate that some of the highest profile pieces were bad (some laughably so).