There’s something quietly humbling about getting rid of things from a family home. When you open drawers, you expect to find old receipts and expired coupons. But every once in a while, you find something that stops you in your tracks. In this case, a woman going through her late mother’s things found a worn-out leather album with more than 1,300 trading cards from the late 1800s that had been tucked away and mostly forgotten. She had no idea what she had. A lot of people wouldn’t.
She told someone she knew she could trust about it. That part is important. The record ended up at a nearby antique store; the kind of store where people trust the owner so much that they leave things on the door because they know the owner will be careful with them. When the album arrived, the shop owner spent about six months researching what was inside it. He then talked to a professional appraiser and decided to consign the collection with Robert Edward Auctions, a company that has been selling cards since the 1800s.
The album itself is very impressive. It sounds like a time capsule of what collecting cards was like in the 1880s and 1890s. It’s just over a foot tall. The first owner put everything in order by set, gluing cards neatly to each page and even taking off the backs of cards so they could lie flat. He signed his name and address inside the front cover with what feels like quiet pride. Purists cringe at that kind of language use. The colors lived on, though. The faces were saved. The man was dedicated, which made up for the fact that he wasn’t very good at keeping records.
More than 100 N172 Old Judge cards from 1887 to 1890, with names like King Kelly, Connie Mack, and Billy Sunday, are some of the most interesting pieces. You can find almost full sets of Allen & Ginter World Champions and Duke “Great Americans,” as well as more than 600 actress cards from that time. If you’re really into collecting things from the 1800s, this isn’t just a find—it’s a ready-made collection of some of the most beautiful sets ever made.
When something like this comes up, it’s hard not to think about stories like Jimmy Micioni’s. Micioni, a man from New Jersey who died at the age of 97, had quietly built up a sports card collection worth more than a million dollars over the course of nearly nine decades. He kept it in his Boonton home, where family members only saw bits and pieces of it over the years. After he died, his nieces and nephews finally cleaned out the house. What they found filled the whole basement. Cards that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx all signed. Stubs from when players sent them back that he had saved. A collection that was so big that it had to be split up into several auction lots. PSA, the company that was hired to grade it, said it was one of the most impressive finds they had seen in thirty years of business.
There is something worth thinking about in both stories. These weren’t archives from big businesses or wealthy estates. People who lived in those homes were normal, but they cared deeply about something that most people had stopped noticing. The leather album from my grandmother. The uncle’s basement was organized. Back in the 1880s, a man wrote his name inside the cover. Someone else kept every envelope. It’s not often that kind of care makes the news. Until it does.
It’s really surprising—or maybe not, depending on how you look at it—how often these collections show up at estate sales, antique shops in the neighborhood, and through word of mouth. Not tips from auction houses or art galleries. Someone who knew where to keep it safe. There were two times when that trust turned out to be very valuable.
