My take on Michael O'Keeffe's book, "The Card"

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Posted By: MW

A couple of points of clarification:

I think Alan Ray may have been confused by a few aspects of the card's condition. First, Ray suggests through several sources that a small red print line that existed near the top border of the card seemingly vanished between the time that he owned the card and the point at which it was auctioned by Sotheby's. This is not the case. I've seen the card in person at two different National Conventions and the small red print line is still there. This is a non-issue.

Second, I think Ray may have been confused by the size of the card as it was displayed in the 1991 Copeland Collection catalog. Many of the images, including that of the T206 Wagner, were slightly cropped in the 1991 Sotheby's catalog. Since Ray, to the best of my knowledge, was not at the auction, his initial statement that the card was trimmed was not based on a physical inspection of the card during or after the sale, but rather, the picture that was used in the auction catalog, which does indeed make the card look smaller than its actual size.

Michael O'Keeffe's statement that "[t]he red printer's line was gone" at the end of the seventh chapter is just plain wrong and his contention that "[t]he edges were no longer wavy" is based on Ray's subjective opinion, not factual evidence. I think that this type of journalism can easily mislead uninformed readers into believing something is true when it is not. If Michael O'Keeffe had simply gone to PSA's booth at the last National Convention (which he attended) and viewed the PSA 8 T206 Wagner he would KNOW that the red print line was still there.

Again, I think this goes back to the same issue involving Cobb and Edwards' fake T206 Wagner that O'Keeffe seems to think is authentic. There are just too many essential and obvious facts that are either missed or excluded from the book.