Posted By:
warshawlawI've seen a lot of vintage tobacco cards pasted into magazines and other books. It is common with OJ and Mayo boxing cards, and I've had many T cards with telltale traces of gluedowns (where I could read the publication's printing on the backs). People used to use magazines a lot as ersatz albums, especially when they could not afford a special album. One of the lots I regret not going after harder was a large Zeenut collection including a Thorpe that someone had pasted into a magazine.
The other point I'd make is that you can't judge a card solely because of the paper it was in contact with. Paper aging is a weird thing. External factors (light and humidity) really do figure into the process. Leave a newspaper in the sun for a day and it will look 30 years old the next morning. Last year I bought an OJ with a great picture, creamy white cardboard, and crisp white borders that had been pasted into a book and not opened for who knows how long until the noncollector seller peeled it out and sold it (SGC graded it, BTW, and I am 99.99% certain of its authenticity independent of SGC's opinion). The card looked great even though the paper surrounding it was over 100 years old because in all likelihood the book sat in dark, dry preservation-type conditions for a century. I've personally had a similar experience with an item I found. I once bought a schedule of screenings of Academy Award nominated films from 1972 as part of an estate lot of similar materials and when I opened it out fell two pristine tickets to the 1972 show. The schedule was yellowed and aged on the cover where it had been exposed to the elements, the tickets were perfect. I have also seen situations where the lower grade paper ages terribly while the higher grade paper right next to it doesn't age anywhere near as badly. Of course, in those cases I've always seen evidence of the better paper against the other paper, usually an area of lesser aging on the crappy paper.
All that being said, I do agree that the odds of someone gluing a 1910 Plank into a 1945 magazine are roughly the same as the odds of successfully landing in Tehran airport in an El Al 747.
04-12-2003, 12:41 PM
t206 Plank reprint sold at $575
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