1951 Mickey Mantle TYPE 1 Photo Used to Create His 1952 TOPPS Card is now at 20K...

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by Rob D.

A major daily newspaper I worked at in the mid 1990s had a great library of first-generation and wire photos from the turn of the century. My duties as a copy and layout editor for the Sports department had me pulling file photos on almost a daily basis. You would be shocked at the manilla folders 2, 3 and 4 inches thick dedicated to photos of Cobb, Ruth, Shoeless Joe, etc. Routinely there were multiple photos of the same pose, many in pristine condition. I spent a lot of time browsing those folders.

This was at a newspaper in the South that never had an association with Major League Baseball. I can only imagine what rests in the bowels of newspapers in big-league cities.

I agree that it's possible that others exist, and a high-profile sale will be the quickest way to flush them out into the open if so. It never ceases to amaze me what scarce/rare items start pouring out of the closets once one sale takes place.

In this case though, the photo being a Type 1 will act as a sort of insulation since, by the time this print was produced, the wire photo process would have been in widespread use. While that doesn't guarantee that this is the only Type 1, it does increase the odds that if/when others do surface, they would be Type 3 wire photos. Even as I write that though, I do note that this photo surfaced was found in the archives of a regional paper (though it does not note which), so perhaps the smaller subscribers still weren't up to date on their technology even though the process had been around for over 15 years at that point? Regardless, my point still stands that for any given 1950's-era photo, the population of Type 3 wire photos is likely to be several times the population of Type 1 original prints of that same image. I can't help but wonder if the writer for Legendary was alluding to this when they said, "This likeness has never before been found in the form of a Type I original image." This makes me think it may have been found as a Type 3, but that is purely conjecture on my part.

Only time will tell as to whether this particular photo holds its value, but I still find the argument of "it's only a photo, I have one of another guy, so it can't be worth more than $50" to be as ludicrous as looking at a Wagner T206 and saying "it's only a baseball card, I have tons of those and used to stick them in my bike spokes so there's no way it's worth that much."