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Originally Posted by ThomasL
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
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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).