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Originally Posted by MikeGarcia
..............Can you add some details ? Sounds fascinating. Thanks , MikeGarcia
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Sure. Here's the story.
The T90 Nature series by La Marquise Cigarettes are very unusual cards of birds from around 1910. What makes them unusual is that they have actual bird feathers from the named bird glued onto the card (i.e. the peacock card has real peacock feathers). Clearly a highly labor-intensive, scarce, and easily damaged card.
About 12 years ago there were only 7 cataloged cards in the set. As recent as 2 years ago there were only about 15 cataloged cards. They were numbered and the highest was "30" so it was believed that 30 different examples were made. About 6-7 of them were shown on the non-sports page right here
http://www1.coe.neu.edu/~dan/T90/go.html - updated recently. I had 4 examples and paid over $200 for each.
An auction appeared a little over 2 years ago with 40 cards from the set. At that time only about 30 total examples were known (and most were owned by a well-known Set Registry collector on this site), so this effectively doubled the known population if real. The red flags were obvious, a seller with a feedback of zero, and the scans were from the non-sports site of which I currently owned 2 of them.
What made me think the auction was real was the list of the 40 cards included the ones I knew were correct along with some new ones. Only an advanced collector of the set, of which there were none, could have gotten this right. The auction ended the same night as the Legendary Live auction so flew under the radar when I took a chance and won them.
After a dozen unreplied emails and 6 weeks later, they arrived and were real, doubling the known population. Oddly enough this auction caused another lot of around 20 to appear boosting the known population to around 90 cards, with the most having 5 examples known. One of the cards is still unknown and one has a population of 1 (think E107 Breisch-Williams rarity).
After trading the dupes, I have 24 of the 30 different, someone else also has 24, another collector has 21, and another collector about 12. Everyone else shares the remaining 9 known cards.
Side note: Some of the cards are for birds that have feathers that are illegal to own in the US, except that these cards were produced a few years before the Department of the Interior laws made them illegal - i.e. they are grandfathered in as legal.