Hughie Jennings
Finest T206 set gets broken up and sold via Heritage Auctions
The finest set of 1909-11 T206 baseball cards is on the market -- and it's being broken up -- this month via Dallas-based Heritage Auctions where it's expected to be a record-breaker.
"For hundreds of trading card collectors, this is the auction event of a lifetime," said Chris Ivy, director of sports collectibles for Heritage. "This auction is the vault door swinging open to reveal treasures unavailable anywhere else."
It's a lot of 520 cards that includes nine PSA 10s -- only 13 in all exist at that grade -- and nearly all of the cards in this one are the highest-graded specimens of their kind for this landmark set. More than 100 of the cards are PSA 9s and only one is graded below a PSA 7 (it's a PSA 6).
Portion of Jack Smalling autograph collection to hit auction
Depending on your age, you might not know the name Jack Smalling -- but he wrote the book on through-the-mail autograph collecting back in the day when most autographs weren't just a click away.
While The Baseball Autograph Collector's Handbook is up to its 19th edition today with addresses for more than 90 percent of known living major leaguers, coaches and umpires inside, it's the fruits of his publishing passion -- his autographs -- that are on the auction block in one single lot coming to the auction from Heritage Auctions next month.
"Many, if not most, of Smalling's greatest successes came from trails long since gone cold, but when Smalling first took up his hobby in 1962, quite a few Dead Ball Era legends still walked the Earth," said the auction listing. "And if not the players themselves, then their children or grandchildren, pleased in that pre-Internet age that somewhere, someone still remembered the man. They were all too happy to drop a cancelled check or a clipping from an old lease into the supplied self-addressed, stamped envelope in fulfillment of Smalling's request. More than a half century later, Smalling's collection of autographs numbers in the six figures."
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