Charles Conlon Fakes, Baseball Magazine Stickers & A Brief Tutorial

[prewarsports]

I think one thing people forget is that in the case of press photos, these were functional tools of an industry. Much more similar to game used bats and equipment than baseball cards but because they are flat and have images of baseball players, people want to treat them like the latter. These things were ripped, trimmed, die-cut, cut out, painted, drawn all over, traced and rubbed by engravers and used over and over again for an endless number of purposes to fit whatever the newspaper or publication wanted. Often times it was a space issue, other times the images were trimmed and laid out to create a composite and then returned to their folders. Also, when dealing with pre-WWI images, many of the images that look trimmed were actually broken off. Silver gelatin photographs from the era were very brittle and if a photo got folded over in a file cabinet it didn't crease, it broke at whatever angle it was folded at. many of these images were also taken by staff photographers and maybe their budget only allowed for a certain amount of photo-paper so they might have been trimmed before the images were even developed onto them. These variables and the functionality of early photography ad to the appeal for me and many collectors. You are holding something in your hand with inherent history (the person photographed) but also a piece of American publishing history with a unique story to tell all on its own!