Hauls of Shame: Heritage pulls Chadwick pass from auction
From SABR member Peter J. Nash at Hauls of Shame on October 24, 2012, with mention of SABR members John Thorn and Dorothy Seymour Mills:
After offering an 1879 baseball contract stolen from NYPLs famous Spalding Collection earlier this year, Heritage Auction Galleries, of Dallas, Texas, was selling yet another stolen item from the library’s flagship Fifth Avenue branch, which was part of the 1970s heist said to be orchestrated by the deceased super-collector and New York Yankees general partner, Barry Halper. But last Friday, after being notified by Haulsofshame.com that the item was stolen, Heritage removed the artifact from its sale scheduled for this week. The rare item was a complimentary season pass issued by the New York Giants in 1894 to Baseball Hall of Famer and pioneering baseball scribe, Henry Chadwick. Heritage estimated that the pass would have sold for close to $2,000.
The 19th-century season pass that appeared in the sale online and in a catalog as lot 81345 was originally pasted into one of Chadwick’s personal scrapbooks that were gifted to Albert G. Spalding and subsequently donated to the NYPL by the magnate’s widow in 1921. The library still retains the entire Chadwick scrapbook, however, the pass was cut from a scrapbook page when it was stolen sometime before 1983 when SABR and historian John Thorn organized and funded the microfilming of the manuscript and scrapbook holdings of the Spalding Collection.
The complimentary pass was previously sold in 1999 along with another Chadwick pass issued by Yale University as lot 152 in Sotheby’s sale of the Barry Halper Collection.
Read the full article here: http://haulsofshame.com/blog/?p=13939
Originally published: October 24, 2012. Last Updated: October 24, 2012.