When it comes to time, an attic is different from the rest of a house. Up there, dust settles in different ways. Light gets through wrong. What looks like a box of old junk can sometimes be something that stops auction house veterans in their tracks. This doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.
It was pretty much like that when Karl Kissner went into the attic of his late grandfather in rural Ohio and pulled out a cardboard box tied with a neat bundle of baseball cards from 100 years ago. Almost 700 of them. Not touched since about 1910. The find, which Heritage Auctions experts called the most important find in the history of the hobby, included cards with famous players like Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, and Connie Mack.
Kissner didn’t go up there to find treasure. Since a family member had been taking care of the house for decades and had died, he and a cousin were helping to clean it out. In the 1940s, the grandfather and his wife died, but the house and everything in it stayed in the family. His daughter kept it until she died in October of last year, leaving it to her twenty nieces and nephews. It was supposed to be a simple inheritance cleanup, but it turned into something else.
The cards are from a set called E98. They were made around 1910 and are thought to have been given out as part of a candy promotion. There are only thirty players in the set, and about half of them are Hall of Famers. This makes every piece that has survived meaningful. But the interesting thing about this box wasn’t just who was on the cards. That was the case. Professional Sports Authenticator reportedly said this collection was the best one it had ever seen. In its entire history, the company had graded less than 700 E98 cards. The best grade the company had ever given to a Ty Cobb E98 card was a seven. Out of these sixteen Cobb cards, sixteen got a score of nine. That gap is pretty big. That is the difference between a benchmark and a piece for a museum.
The Honus Wagner came next. He called it “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards,” which makes sense since any kind of Wagner card is one of the most sought-after in the world. This particular one got a perfect 10 from PSA. A first for that series ever. The first person to look at the cards was Peter Calderon at Heritage Auctions. He said, “I was in complete awe.” They’re not usually this nice.
The grandfather might not have known what he was sitting on. Kissner thought that his immigrant grandfather might have put them away because he didn’t know what to do with them and never thought about them again. Which, when you think about it, is a really strange kind of luck: not knowing you have something important to protect and leaving it alone protecting it perfectly by accident. An air-conditioned vault would not have been able to do what the attic did better.
The twenty heirs agreed to split the cards and any money that came from them. Heritage Auctions was going to release the collection slowly over two to three years so that there wouldn’t be a huge rush, which could have lowered prices. The top 37 cards were thought to fetch around $500,000. They were going to be auctioned off in August at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Baltimore. It was thought that the whole collection would sell for between $2 and $3 million.
When you watch something like this happen, you get the sense that the real story isn’t or isn’t just about money. It’s about what gets passed on without anyone being aware of it. Grandpa who came to the U.S., gathered cards he didn’t fully understand, put them in a box, and forgot about them for one hundred years. They were found because someone had to clean the attic, not because his grandchildren did a search. It’s not a fairy tale. That’s how things work some of the time.
