REA Catalog Sale Will Be Heavy on T206 Cards

The catalog for Robert Edward Auctions’ 2010 blockbuster sale will ship on April 9, 2010. As always, the first copy off the presses will be presented to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York for their library, as is REA’s time-honored tradition. The remaining 10,000 catalogs will be sent to collectors all over the world who have been anxiously awaiting the baseball collecting world’s most highly anticipated auction.

Inside the catalog will be hundreds of items worthy of the most prestigious collections in the world, both public and private. The final date of bidding in this year’s auction will be Saturday, May 1. Bidding begins April 12 by FAX, phone, or the Internet via the REA website. Total sales for the event are expected to exceed $5 million.

T206 Wagner

Among the thousands of items in the auction is the most highly sought-after and valuable baseball card in the world – the T206 Honus Wagner. Graded PR-FR 1 by PSA, the “Connecticut Wagner” has been lost to the collecting world, locked away in a safe deposit box for the past 25 years by its owners, a father and son collecting team, who purchased the card along with a complete T206 set for $10,000 at a Connecticut card show in the 1980s.

With a reserve of $50,000 and an estimate of $150,000+ for just the one card, that $10,000 investment seems like a very wise one today. “But it’s important to remember,” notes REA president Robert Lifson, “that in 1985, $10,000 for baseball cards was real money. Just like today, there are people who thought that was a crazy price at the time. But that’s just what it was worth back then.”

The sellers are still collectors, and are parting with their prize with great trepidation. “It’s just too valuable for us to keep. We can’t justify having a baseball card that might be worth as much as a couple hundred thousand dollars, or maybe even more. Whatever it sells for, we know we’re going to make out very well, and we’ll put the money to good use. Depending on exactly what it sells for, we may even take a small percentage to buy a few cards.”

The T206 Eddie Plank, another of card collecting’s most famous rarities, is represented in this auction with not one, but THREE examples – two graded GOOD 30 by SGC (one with a $5,000 reserve and an estimate of $10,000/$20,000; the other with a $2,500 reserve and an estimate of $5,000/$10,000) and one graded VG 40 by SGC (with a $10,000 reserve and an estimate of $20,000/$30,000).

This auction will be the first in the history of collecting to include every rare advertising back in the T206 set. Included in the offering will even be the famous Southern League Old Mill Overprint back, the only example known of one of T206 collecting’s most legendary rarities (and for those who are familiar with the story, this very card was the inspiration for the fake T206 Old Mill Overprints that were circulating until 2009, when a group of dedicated collectors presented their findings to the FBI, whose interest exposed and put an end to the fraud, and convinced the perpetrator to make all victims whole).