John-I have signed up to bid but if my concerns are not satisfied I may cancel that. If I knew enough to examine the card and make an intelligent deduction about whether it is period I would. However, beyond being able to tell if the photo is albumen I bring nothing to the table. However, I and, from what I hear on the board, others have some genuine concerns about the card which have not yet been addressed. For virtually every card in the hobby, what we are asking is way over the top. However, for this card I don't believe it is. This card is merely a photo glued to a Williamson mount. Williamson mounts from is period are common. So really, to make this card all you need is an albumen photo of the team. How can you get one of those? Well you can have a modern photographer create a negative from the LOC image, fade out part of the background, print the photo using the albumen process and then attach this photo to the mount and presto, you have a CdV like this. The photo would be albumen so it would pass muster with Paul Messier, and SGC would have no reason to suspect anything(is SGC really expert on photographic images from this period?).
There is a second way to create the card. Suppose someone "comes upon" some rare period team photographs glued to scorebook or scrapbook pages. We see things like this in the NYPL and the HOF, photographs off their mounts just attached side by side to pages. Then, all one would have to do is soak the photo off the page and attach it to the aforementioned easily found Williamson mount and voila you have a card like this. Since in either case the photograph would have been attached in recent times there is a chance that a binder was used that was not available in 1865. That is why I would like to see the binder analyzed. This would not hurt the card if done by a professional.
We have all seen that forgers can do some amazing things. There are few people in the world more knowledgeable about memorabilia items from this period than Corey. There are also few people more thorough than Corey. Despite this, for a long time he was fooled by trophy balls from this era. I maintain that it was more difficult to create the phony trophy balls than it would be to create a phony CdV. I'm in no way saying this CdV is not everything it is claimed to be. I have no way of knowing and I am just trying to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible.
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