Last month we had a post about the remarkably pristine collection of early 1900s baseball cards discovered in an Ohio attic, which experts speculated could fetch as much as $3 million.
The first batch of those cards was auctioned off last night at the annual National Sports Collectors Convention in Baltimore and a 37-card lot sold for $566,132, including $239,000 for the Honus Wagner card pictured below.
As a kid I attended the National Sports Collectors Convention with my dad a handful of times and it’s a pretty amazing event for anyone into card collecting, so I can only imagine the scene there as “gem mint” 1910 cards of Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and Cy Young were drawing bids for a half-million dollars.
In all there are 700 cards, nearly all of them in perfect condition, and the Associated Press reports that “Heritage Auctions plans to sell most of the Ohio cards over the next two of three years through auctions.” And the money will be split 20 ways among members of the Hench family in Defiance, Ohio.