Goudey

And then you have the early '40s, you had...

Or early '30s, you had Goudey, and that ushered in a whole other set, uh, set of set collecting with manufactured scarcity, with the, with the Napoleon Lajoye, and bookends with '48 Leaf, which was also a mass produced...

Part of it was mass produced to sell gum to kids.

So to quote, uh, I wonder if it was Nabokov, but he's like, "We all come from Gogol's raincoat." That is the golden age of, uh, of sports cards.

And even when I...

Josh, even when I was saying like, uh, '48 to '52, I, I really took a narrow approach there.

But how do I not include the Play Balls and the Goudeys and the, of course, the, all the tobacco era cards from the 1909 through, you know, 1915 or whenever that, that kind of ends? Uh, it's all, it's all wonderful, but if golden era really means like the peak or the best time, I guess it comes back to the, the way the question was framed originally for the crossover by Shrug.

Uh, like w- I would almost wanna hear from him again, what do you, what...

... who's an all-time great dealer, on, um, talking about his collection and talking about what he sells.

He told the story of his father, who was a 1933 Goudey collector.

Like pulling Goudey cards from Pax collector, that when he was younger, all the kids wanted the Sitting Bull card.

So, um, um, he traded his, uh, his Babe Ruth card, his father did, for the Sitting Bull card.

True story.

The Sitting Bull is real.

It's a great card.

I personally enjoy the 33 Goudey Indians.

Hard to get nines in a 1954.

Then there are individual auctions for all the different Babe Ruth 1933 Gaudi cards in different grades.

Lower grades, but here's one, the card number 149 is at PSA 2 is at $10,000 already for a 2.

Number 181 in the PSA 1-5-MK, which means it has a mark, is at $1,800.

Just get the cards out." And I love that 'cause that's a part of history of the card, history of collecting.

'33 Goudey I love, um, just I don't care if they're off-center or not.

I like the, the artwork on those cards.

Um, like T206's, centering isn't that important to me on those.

Um, yeah, but then the, the AI generation says, "I think there's a fascinating parallel to vintage sports cards." It says, "This article actually has major implications for the vintage card market because the same generational transfer is happening with collections of baseball cards, memorabilia, coins, watches, et cetera.

The difference is that sports card have a mu- sports cards have a much broader collector ecosystem than many artists do.

A 33 Goudey Babe Ruth or a 52 Topps Mickey Mantle has an obvious identity, historical importance, and established collector base.

An obscure 1970s artist may have none of those things.

And so I was looking for things like that.

Whereas other people were just trying to buy the more actively, popularly traded Tops and Bowmans and Gaudis and play balls.

I like those too.

I picked those up too.

They s- they've been the same way for 30 years of the way they collect.

For me, I get inspired by different things, and I go down a path, and I sometimes love the path, and I sometimes say, "I like part of the path, but I don't need the whole thing." I can give tons of examples, but, like, one of them, like, 38 Goudey cards, okay? Uh, I love the DiMaggios, I love the Fellers, I've loved The Fox, I loved...

You know, I, I loved a bunch of the cards that were in that set.

But then I've realized, like, I don't know if I need four or five different players, the cartoon and the non-cartoon version of each one, which I have, okay? So it's like, as I'm progressing through this, I'm like, you know what? The cards that I like the most of that set is the DiMaggio and the Feller.

That's true.

The, uh, next page, we've got an Ogden, uh, Leaders of Men Abraham Lincoln.

We've got a Larry Bird Magic Dr. J rookie card, and, uh, we've got a Jimmy Fox and a Hank Greenberg '38 Goudey.

We've got a well-centered 50 Bowman Warren Spahn, a Pee Wee Reese rookie card really well-centered, and then a Bond bread with the clipped corners of Joe DiMaggio.

Ted signs for 59, which for whatever reason, Fleer had a pull because somehow Bucky Harris was still under contract to Topps, and he was on that card, and they had to pull that card, and so it became a short print, and people did counterfeits.

And actually before that, before that one, about 75, 76, they redid Gaudi cards.

And these Gaudi reprints were so good because they were basically on the original stock that Gaudi used.

They fooled a lot of the experts at the time, and this is pre-grading.

So I mean, counterfeiting has been going on at least 50 years.

It's got a sin- uh, surface wrinkle on it.

Uh, I don't know how good this is gonna show up, but we got a 1933 Goudey number 92 Lou Gehrig and a two.

Mm.

Very cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that Goudey set-

Lee, what's the headline card in the '54 set, and can a bidder take a look at that card, the headline card? Yeah, I, I can, you know, scan it.