Show interesting discoveries made about a card after already owning it

[Exhibitman]

N332 S.F. Hess Charlie Mitchell (HOFer).



This one was sold as an unidentified photo of an anonymous boxer and sold for less than 1% of what an N332 would normally cost. I knew it was familiar but I just couldn't place it. Eventually I looked at the card back under direct sun light and realized that someone wrote "Charlie Mitchell" on the back in very faint pencil. Once I saw that the rest of the iD was easy.

This one was my first really extensive research project and I was very proud of it! 1860s CDV of John C. Heenan (HOF).



This is the earliest verifiable boxing card. Fredricks was one of the first to make albumen images, a skill he learned in France and brought to the States in 1855. By the time this card was issued as part of his commercially produced "Specialite" series of famous personages, Fredricks owned a large studio and gallery in New York City. His work is featured in a number of museum collections, including the Smithsonian. I saw the card offered as a CDV by a UK seller. Something about the copyright notice caught my eye. I did some research and learned that until 1870 copyright registration was handled by the local Federal courts. After that it was centralized in DC. Pre-1870 items would carry the district court notation.

I'll give you a baseball one too. Rodine baseball postcard:



I found this one at the first Baltimore National. Apparently, Rodine is a paint inhibitor that the American Chemical Paint Co. made. It commissioned a series of these postcards for promoting Rodine and sent them to paint wholesalers and commercial end users. I found another one date-stamped and pinned down the set to 1954. The artist, Jerry Doyle, was a commercial cartoonist for a newspaper in Philadelphia. He has some following but the cards were not part of any catalog of his works that I could locate. The postcard references a premium available on request. Took me years to run down one of them:

[packs]

I bought this card while I was in Berlin. I found it in a shoebox of ephemera that a street vendor was selling. I thought it was cool that it had Jesse Owens on it.

But later I found out the story of the man Jesse Owens is next to; Luz Long. Long was a German athlete who was one of the few Olympians in general who became friendly with Owens during the games, giving Owens advice on the track and saving Owens from a critical fault during the long jump.

A few years after the games Long was killed in action during World War II. But Owens had such fond memories of his time with Long during the games that he served as best man at Long's son's wedding nearly 30 years later:

[brianp-beme]

Some great and varied responses...I especially like the Rose Postcard and Jesse Owens stories.

Here is another one from my collecting. I purchased a lot of 3 lower condition M116 cards (shown below) from an Ebay auction about 10 years ago. I was pretty much interested in the Curtis and Gardner cards, as I did not have them, as I already had a F. Smith. A couple of months after receiving the lot of 3, I finally had the chance to add them to my collection. Well, I discovered that the F. Smith had a different team designation (Boston Americans instead of Chicago Americans, the designation on the card I already had in my collection).

Turns out by a complete stroke of luck, (I honestly would have not noticed the team designation difference if I had not already had a F. Smith card) I had accidentally discovered an unknown M116 variation. The card I discovered is still unique...and someone out there in auctionland owns it, and it perhaps is part of a master set that only they could possess.

Brian

[Jobu]

I learned that this issue, which was unknown to me, was similar to Yuasa but actually a new set, G.T. Sun Co:

https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...ighlight=yuasa

[h2oya311]

I bought a huge lot of strip cards back in 2013 (mostly for a few Ruth cards and some others I needed) and was going through each and selling them individually in 2014 when I realized I had stumbled upon something pretty cool. I don't think it is checklisted anywhere and certainly wasn't the "find of the year" by any stretch, but I thought it was neat/interesting nonetheless.

Here is a rare 1920 W519 (Numbered Ver02) Cravath #18 with his first name listed as "Gobby" instead of "Gabby". He used to go by "Gavvy".

Here's a link to the thread where I "outted" it:

https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=180169

[gabrinus]

Cool card Derek...don't believe I have ever seen it before...Jerry

[chlankf]

Not a card but a super find in my collection. This picture of Hughie Nelson came to me in a lot of vintage Des Moines Register/Tribune photos I pick up. A few years later I purchased a 1929 Des Moines program and was thrilled to see my photo was the actual photo use in the printed program.