New 1914 Babe Ruth Card Discovered?

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Posted By: Robert Lifson

I want to be very careful not agreeing absolutely in full with someone who is paying for dinner at Peter Luger's! (Please let me know when this is.) The team card doesn't look like a counter display to me. I've never seen a counter display this size. It would be the smallest counter display in the world, and one of the few with no way to stand itself up and be displayed. It looks like a card or a premium that was given away to promote The Baltimore News. I don't think it could possibly be anything else. Maybe there were a pile of these at the newsstand that were given away, we'll never know. The definition of what is or is not a card is always amusing. Sometimes there are gray areas. This one fits every defintion of a card to me but I suppose it really depends on how you define a card. Does a card have to be a particular thickness? No.(T201 Mecca) Is a card allowed to have a photographic surface? Yes. (T200 Fatima) Is a card allowed to have a blank back? Yes.(Exhibit cards) Is a card allowed to be 4.5 x 6.5 inches? Yes.(cabinet cards, larger issues such as T3 Turkey Reds). If one defines a card as not being allowed to have a combination of (or all of) these qualities, then it's not a card. That is not how I define a card but I know that different people might think differently. Now don't go excluding me from dinner just because I think this is a card!