[benjulmag]

Thank you for posting this thread. It is very interesting and hopefully will lead to some good. Though, I do agree with an earlier post that we must be very careful not to cast false accusations on "clean" items. That is not fair to their owners. Sometimes the perception can become the reality and, with no clear evidence an item might be stolen other than matching an item on the NYPL missing list, I'm not entirely comfortable with displaying such an item.

Your knowledge of 19th century baseball memorabilia is quite impressive, as is your knowledge of past events. In fact, in my 25 years of collecting 19th century memorabilia, only one other name comes to mind of one whose knowledge might be the equal.

While we're on the subject of doing good for the hobby, I would like to respectfully suggest we expand the scope of our mission to include counterfeit items. As I'm sure you know, that is another area that presents quite a problem and where well-intentioned hobbyists can suffer serious financial loss. Maybe we can start a thread listing/showing all items discovered to be counterfeit, both to warn future prospective purchasers to stay away from them as well as to highlight what a sinister mind can accomplish with sufficient expertise and motivation. I would like to suggest that for those items we list/display, we also include their known chain of ownership. That way, if enough items are described, maybe there will be sufficient overlap of identity such that, to use your words, "our detective work will even lead us to the culprits."