Let’s talk about the Silver sheets, as there seems to be no point in holding off discussion anymore and the secret is clearly out. So these started appearing a few weeks ago on eBay listed as ‘early reprints’. Suspicious, as I have never seen a fake of a T220-1 Silver border, good or bad. The White borders have some Dover reprints, but I’ve never seen any attempt to reproduce the silvers at all. Doesn’t mean it’s legit though, I wasn’t sure at first. The first listed was for $19.50 minimum bid and it didd not even sell. I saw it on the relisting, offered the seller $100 (I figured that was a fair risk, considering what I did and did not know at the time) if he would list it at a BIN. He declined, I won it for like $20. Once I had it in hand, it was obviously real.
They are missing the silver final layer, and are blank backed. The tan underlayer of ink, that rests below the silver, is present. If you look closely you can see this on final production cards, the silver is usually not applied truly perfect and and part of this is visible on one of the four edges. There are numerous tiny recurring print defects on final production cards, that line up with one of the 8 slots present on these sheets. For example, some copies of the Driscoll/Glover card have what appears to be a stain in the upper right corner. It’s not, it’s a recurring print defect, on 1 of the 8 slots on the sheet and recurring in final production cards. Under microscope and magnifying glass examination, everything matches up right to a proper c. 1910 American Lithographic product. The panel of Ben Jordan includes a September, 1910 (which lines up pretty much exactly right to when I would have guessed production was beginning) acceptance mark. The Donovan sheet, of course, cannot possibly be an early reprint as there is no evidence anyone in the hobby knew this card existed until 2005. I thought it should exist as the 25th card, and not Jack Goodman, because of the image’s background type (more here:
https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=260805), but when it first appeared, it had a completely different background from the white border version of the Donovan Today card. Thus, even if someone produced a fake by giving a silver border to the white border Donovan card, it couldn’t possibly be like this and match the proper silver border Donovan. I can provide close up’s and pictorial evidence better than the auction photos later, though Net54 likes to neuter image quality. I'm on vacation right now so they aren't in front of me, but I will post further pics this week. Because of the 80kb file size limit, shoot me a DM if there's something you'd like to see in full, higher quality
I won the next several listings for between $10 and $89. One bidder ran a few of them up just a little bit; an odd sum to bid. Too much to pay for a fake, far too little for something real. Presumably they were in the same boat I was initially, unsure if authentic and taking a little risk. I thought the Donovan sheet would give it away, as it obviously can’t be what it was described as. I got that one for $90. The next batch of 5 another member here noticed and ran the price up between $150-$400. That was the end of it for me. I bid a little under $2,000 on them by the end, the last 2 my bids got topped on Beecher and Moore. I thought my bids had a good chance of holding even if these got publicly outed, but pricing stuff like this is always a total crapshoot. I had hoped to keep the sheet together, partially for research purposes to piece a sheet together and partly to frame that recreated sheet on my wall for display. If one of you guys here was the winner, I’d love to know so that we may share information on them and see if we can put together the panels in sheet order to further public knowledge of the issue. After Beecher and Moore closed, the seller yanked the listings for Carney, McCoy and Dempsey.
Hopefully the others appear and we can at least get images of all together. The layout will be interesting, and have clues to other American Tobacco/American Lithography sets in the larger formats (I suspect T218-3, at least, mirrors the look of this sheet with the block format printing of a subject). It may also give some clues to the short printing. Either the final layout was changed or Donovan was not intended originally to be a short print (which I suspect is so); he was likely pulled early on as, even if the layout was changed to put a single Donovan on a sheet, he would not be nearly so difficult as he is. I know of only 3 proven copies with a photo (POP reports would suggest 4 extant; I know where 3 reside), it does not exist in 1/8 the supply, or 1/16 or even 1/32 of the other cards. If there is a James Corbett panel, its presence and layout position, or lack thereof, may suggest something as well.
There is a lone Jack McAuliffe card like this, blank backed and without the layer of silver metal, known to the hobby.
There were also some E229 panels listed that I won. This set was not thought to be a product of American Lithographic (at least not by myself), but now I suspect it actually was. American Lithography is known to have had most of these athletes under contract in 1910, and the sheets were found “in a house” presumably near his New York location. These E229 sheets stopped coming up for sale early as more T220-1’s were listed, it’s not near a full sheet that has appeared. We don’t really have a track and field forum anywhere and they aren’t non-sports, so I hope it may be forgiven to include them in this discussion here anyways. I asked the seller about where he got these, and he said "In a box in a house clean out". The New York location of the seller would make me suspect a family of an American Lithographic employee, but who knows for sure. I see these are not the first panels to appear. There is no picture but the Met has a listing for one in the Burdick Collection (
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/720963), mislisted as being from the 1920's.
I’d love to hear from the rest of you about these, if one of you was the winner of the final 2 sales, you have noticed something else about these, a better theory on the SP’ing from it, or anything else it may suggest. Also seems a good time for a general review of what we do and do not know about this issue. Pretty cool find the seller has accidentally made for the research side of the hobby here. Happy to have won half the set before it got away from me, these are my favorite issue as I've written about probably too many times here. Once in a lifetime chance.
I’m off to get my scissors and cut up this Donovan sheet, think I could get a PSA 9 on some of them.