TYPICALLY, I TRY NOT TO USE THIS SPACE TO WRITE ABOUT THE AUCTION. I generally feel like our catalogs speak for themselves; they are packed with items you don’t see every day, interesting items for collectors of every stripe. We write accurate descriptions, we tell stories, we stay away from P.T. Barnum marketing. So I use this space to tell stories, or to relate anecdotes about things that happen along the road that I think you might find interesting. But at some point during the production of this auction, it occurred to me: there is a lot of rare stuff here . I mean a lot . One museum-quality piece after another. I found myself writing “only surviving example” more than once and “none graded higher” an inordinate number of times. The first 35 lots in this auction
We’ve got two cards from the incredibly rare 1893 Just So Tobacco set, including the only example of Hall of Famer Buck Ewing, a card that, up until being discovered in the walls of an old house, was only theorized to have existed. We’ve got three rare N167 Old Judge cards, and the best of only two graded examples of Wilbert Robinson’s rookie card, from the 1887 N690 Kalamazoo Bats set. We have a gorgeous photo of Jackie Robinson from his time with the 1946 Montreal Royals – the only example of the photo we can find. We have an impossibly rare 1980 Topps Pepsi-Cola All-Stars set on an uncut sheet – one of only three or four complete sheets known to exist.
We’re also loaded up with different card types. I decided to count how many different types were featured in this auction, and I stopped counting at 270. Two hundred seventy different sets are represented in these pages! From unique cards like the Alpha Engraving Steve Brodie or the 1887 Keith Brothers Lincoln team cabinet (with a rookie Jake Beckley) to the #5 1962 Topps set on the PSA Registry broken into hundreds of individual lots, this catalog is absolutely chock full of incredible cards. I’m pretty proud of this auction. I think in terms of sheer interesting, unusual and unique material, it’s the best we’ve ever offered – page after page of items that just don’t appear in auction catalogs with any frequency. It is a truly special sale. And the best part? It’s just our first auction of 2026. We’ve got three more planned after this one, and we have amazing material planned for each. We’ve got a full year of unique and interesting items to present to you. I couldn’t be more excited. Stay tuned – starting with this catalog, we are going to present a host of incredible rarities, all year long. Buckle up! Al Crisafulli Auction Director
are packed with some of the rarest and most interesting things you’ll ever see. It’s the most interesting and diverse catalog we’ve ever assembled. The piece that’s most amazing to me is the Pete Hill signed contract. Up until this contract appeared, the hobby had never seen a Hill autograph, with the exception of two military documents not in public hands. In his 1999 book The Negro Leagues Autograph Guide , Kevin Keating wrote “Despite our access to some of the largest private and public collections of Negro Leagues documents and autographs, we were unable to locate irrefutable signature samples from a number of major Negro Leagues stars, including some potential Hall of Famers.” Since the publication of that book, Pete Hill has become a Hall of Famer, and Kevin Keating is a lead autograph authenticator for PSA/DNA. But until the discovery of this contract, a Pete Hill autograph had not revealed itself. Some lucky autograph collector will emerge from this auction the first known collector to own a Pete Hill signature. Thtat’s not all. We’ve got an unbelievable Old Judge rarity, one of the only California League Old Judge cards that has sold in years. Charles Krehmeyer has been described in the Old Judge bible as an “Ultimate Rarity,” one of 18 impossibly difficult cards to obtain.
SPRING 2026 PREMIER AUCTION − CLOSES APRIL 11, 2026 1
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