Posted By:
PaulI didn't have the patience to read this entire thread, so if this question has already been asked, please forgive me.
As I understand it, the theory is that Woody Gelman and other true hobby pioneers decided to start printing their own Goudey and T206 cards in the 1950s, mostly to obtain cards they didn't own. To do this, they acquired the original Goudey printing plates (which were then 20 years old) and the original T206 printing plates (which were then about 45 years old), including the printing plate(s) for the T206 Wagner.
My question is this: where are the printing plates now? Surely Woody Gelman, Charles Bray, Buck Barker, Jefferson Burdick and the rest of the hobby pioneers would have appreciated the extraordinary collectability of the original printing plate of the T206 Wagner. It's my understanding that Burdick did not even acquire a Wagner until a few years before donating his collection, and some of the other pioneers never found one. Surely any one of them would have thought that it would be a real hoot to include the printing plate of this impossible card in their collections. But I'm not aware of a single T206 or Goudey printing plate ever being uncovered, either in the collections of the pioneers or anywhere else. Where did they go?