1869 ball card swiped from NYPL is retrieved
A rare baseball card that went AWOL from the New York Public Library at least 30 years ago is back in the Big Apple.
A member of the NYPL security team traveled to Texas last month to retrieve the 1869 card featuring the Cincinnati Red Stockings from memorabilia dealer Leon Luckey, who agreed to surrender the collectible he purchased in 2000 for $10,000.
“I think it is wonderful that he voluntarily returned the card,” chief library officer Mary Lee Kennedy said Monday.
The card, in remarkably good shape for a nearly 150-year-old piece of cardboard, will not be displayed in a public area, but will be available for viewing for researchers and fans on an appointment-only basis.
The rare baseball card, printed seven years before the formation of the National League, featured an ad for a New York sporting goods retailer called Peck & Snyder, which distributed the trading cards on street corners in order to drum up business.
As the Daily News reported in July, the FBI teamed up with NYPL officials earlier this year to determine if the card was stolen from the library’s Albert Spalding Collection. Spalding’s family donated about 3,000 cards, documents and other memorabilia to the library in 1921, six years after the death of the baseball pioneer.
A 1987 audit revealed that the 1869 Red Stockings card — along with hundreds of other pieces from the Spalding collection — had been swiped from the library.
Luckey, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, said he purchased the card from now-defunct Mastro Auctions and held on to it for about 15 years. He said he did not know that there were questions about the Peck & Snyder until he was approached at the 2014 National Sports Collectors Convention by an FBI agent who suspected the card might have been stolen. Luckey said the agent examined the card but then returned it.
Luckey, the moderator of a collectors forum called Net 54 Baseball, consigned the Peck & Snyder this summer to Heritage Auctions, which said the card could sell for $40,000 or more. But the auction catalogue raised fresh questions about the history of the card: The company said fragments of a stamp on the back of the card suggested it might have come from a library. Heritage eventually stopped accepting bids for the card.
Luckey, according to a source familiar with the case, ultimately let the FBI know that he wanted to speak to NYPL officials. “I was happy to give it to the New York Public Library, where it once probably resided,” Luckey said Monday. “I’m glad it will be available for my fellow collectors.”