AP: 1865 baseball card expected to fetch six figures

From The Associated Press on January 9, 2013:

Six-figure bids are expected when an auction house sells a rare 148-year-old baseball card that was discovered at a yard sale in rural Maine, the auction house manager said Wednesday.

A man found the card by chance in a photo album he bought while antique picking in the small town of Baileyville on the Canadian border, said Troy Thibodeau of Saco River Auction Co. in Biddeford.

It’s not the same as a modern baseball card, which became commonplace beginning in the 1880s. Instead, it’s an original photograph from 1865 of the Brooklyn Atlantics amateur baseball club mounted on a card. The card shows nine players gathered around their manager.

Thibodeau said he’s aware of only two such cards in existence, the other at the Library of Congress. Putting a dollar-figure value on it is difficult, he said, but he expects it to fetch at least $100,000 at the Feb. 6 auction.

“There hasn’t been another one that’s sold,” he said. “When there are only two known in the world, what’s it worth?”

Read the full article here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/01/09/1865-baseball-card/1820835/



Originally published: January 11, 2013. Last Updated: January 11, 2013.