N332 S.F. Hess Charlie Mitchell (HOFer).
This one was sold as an unidentified photo of an anonymous boxer and sold for less than 1% of what an N332 would normally cost. I knew it was familiar but I just couldn't place it. Eventually I looked at the card back under direct sun light and realized that someone wrote "Charlie Mitchell" on the back in very faint pencil. Once I saw that the rest of the iD was easy.
This one was my first really extensive research project and I was very proud of it! 1860s CDV of John C. Heenan (HOF).
This is the earliest verifiable boxing card. Fredricks was one of the first to make albumen images, a skill he learned in France and brought to the States in 1855. By the time this card was issued as part of his commercially produced "Specialite" series of famous personages, Fredricks owned a large studio and gallery in New York City. His work is featured in a number of museum collections, including the Smithsonian. I saw the card offered as a CDV by a UK seller. Something about the copyright notice caught my eye. I did some research and learned that until 1870 copyright registration was handled by the local Federal courts. After that it was centralized in DC. Pre-1870 items would carry the district court notation.
I'll give you a baseball one too. Rodine baseball postcard:
I found this one at the first Baltimore National. Apparently, Rodine is a paint inhibitor that the American Chemical Paint Co. made. It commissioned a series of these postcards for promoting Rodine and sent them to paint wholesalers and commercial end users. I found another one date-stamped and pinned down the set to 1954. The artist, Jerry Doyle, was a commercial cartoonist for a newspaper in Philadelphia. He has some following but the cards were not part of any catalog of his works that I could locate. The postcard references a premium available on request. Took me years to run down one of them:
