Is this authentic?

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Posted By: davidcycleback

It's a reasonable question to post, and beginner's shouldn't hesitate to post such authenticity questions.

The edge "toning" on this card is so bad it's laughable. Baseball cards done naturally tone like that. Toning due to age is usually even throughout the card. It doesn't look like it was dipped or painted on in varnish. It's true genuine cards can get stained by terpentine or varnish or a spilled cup of coffee. However, the only realistic way the card can get staining like this is for someone to carefully dip all four edges into a staining liquid-- and that would be no accident. Drop and flip and skip and cartwheel 200 cards in a bucket of varnish, and you won't get one with staining like this.

Then, of course, the question is why would someone carefully dip a genuine T206 Ty Cobb in varnish so as to darkly stain just the four edges? The answer is, no one would. Even in 1912, when the card was worth nothing, a rascally 7 year old boy wouldn't carefully stain all four edges like this. He wouldn't even think to do it, much less see a point in doing it.