Amazon.com Review
"By pursuing his avocation with the ferocity and determination of Ty Cobb stretching a two-base hit into a triple, Barry Halper assembled the world's largest and most significant private collection on baseball, an achievement that should be ranked with the great American collections of the American century...." This quote from Sotheby's auction catalog underscores the importance of Barry Halper not only to the sports-memorabilia world but also to baseball history. During a 50-year stretch, Halper gathered over 100,000 items from the great game, including a 1912 World Series program signed by "Smokey" Joe Wood and President Woodrow Wilson, a ticket stub from the Lou Gehrig memorial game, and Mickey Mantle's 1956 Triple Crown Trophy. The entire legendary lot will be offered in two separate auctions: one live at Sotheby's New York headquarters (September 23-29, 1999) and the other via the Internet at www.sothebys.amazon.com. (For more information, visit our
section detailing the auctions and the collection.)
The handsome, slipcased catalog includes three volumes highlighting the event. The first two contain over 2,000 photographs (most in color), plus detailed descriptions and estimated auction prices of the items; the items are divided into 16 sale sessions arranged chronologically and by theme. The third volume examines the history of baseball and includes a timeline of the sport's past as well as essays written by Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, and others. An essential resource for bidders, this catalog also makes an outstanding addition to any sports fan's library. --Andy Boynton
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the Foreword
Willie Mays once explained that, for him, baseball was a simple game: "If they throw it, I hit it; if they hit it, I catch it." Barry Halper has followed a similarly fundamental - and similarly effective- approach to collecting our national pastime: if baseball players threw it, hit it, or caught it (or wore it, signed it, endorsed it, inspired it, or posed for it), Barry collected it. By pursuing his avocation with the ferocity and determination of Ty Cobb stretching a two-base hit into a triple, Barry Halper assembled the world's largest and most significant private collection on baseball, an achievement that should be ranked with the great American collections of the American century and not simply with other major accumulations of sports memorabilia.
In size and scope, the Halper Collection resembles a Continental country house sale, in which thousands of diverse items accumulated by generations of occupants are brought at once under the auctioneer's hammer - the rare and the common, the valuable and the inexpensive, the grand and the negligible, the famous and the obscure. And, truth be told, Barry has been collecting for "generations" - almost exactly fifty years.
One of the great beauties of baseball is that is has no game clock; time never runs out if a team can continue to rally during its innings. The same is not true of the auction of the Barry Halper Collection. Collectors are being offered a seven day series of live auctions, and extra innings in the form of Internet bidding, but when the last lot is knocked down, the clock will run out, for there can never be another assemblage to rival the Barry Halper Collection. "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America,' Jacques Barzun observed, 'had better learn baseball." The enduring legacy of Barry Halper is that those who want to learn baseball will continue to study this catalogue long after the auction has ended."
