wild caramel story

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Posted By: warshawlaw

A treasure trove of E77 cards recently surfaced on ebay. E77 is a set of very rare boxing and wrestling cards. Any advanced collector will tell you that they are virtually impossible to find, let alone in quantities. A total of 14 cards have been offered on ebay, with a coincidental 15th in the current SCGaynor auction. The story gets wild with this: All 14 cards were offered by the same seller. One of the images showed about a dozen other cards and the seller's listing invited email inquiries about additional cards from the set. The cards were all very low grade (p-f, maybe g). The seller offered the ones he put up for sale at a low price with no reserve, and did not know much about the cards initially (he only used the E77 terminology in the later sales, which I assume he heard from folks inquiring about the cards).

As I understand things the seller received over 50 inquiries and many offers to buy some or all of the cards, which he said were in in the hundreds and included a number of complete sets. Apparently, he accepted an offer of $15,000 for the lot from a NY collector. I inquired as to the details for use in my book and/or an article. The seller then told me that he did not want to provide details about the find and that he had decided to keep the balance of the cards for his grandkids to have a nest egg for the future.

The following information comes from Wesley Liu, who was in contact with the seller early on: The seller is still shopping the cards around and pitting private offerees against one another in a sort of virtual auction. The cards belonged to the seller’s wife's grandfather and break down as follows: there were some rough E90-1’s already auctioned on ebay, 175 E77s, one E78, 25 E79s with one rare red back, and between 40-50 strip cards, six of which I also acquired in the same lot as the E77s. The wife nixed the $15,000 sale and may be behind the virtual auction.

I won one of the lots and received my cards. They are legit, if low grade, E77s.

The seller has since pulled the plug on a half-dozen additional E77 auctions he had going.