Want your advice on selling baseball collection 1946-50

Mydadscollection

Hi. My father was passionate about collecting National League baseball memorabilia from about 1947-50. He passed away about a decade ago. I would like to sell his collection but couldn't bear to have it go in the general house estate sale for $100 as he would not have wanted that. So I packed up his boxes and drove them across the country to where I live. I've been going thru and inventorying what he has and looking things up on ebay and recent auctions. My question is for those of you who know a lot more than I do about how best to go about this.

From my reading, I see that autographs generally need PSA evaluation/ratings which will have a cost; may not be worthwhile for all the autographs.
I'm not interesting in selling things one by one on ebay as I don't have the bandwidth/interest and hate mailing things. I'm thinking about offering all to an auction house, assuming that they will sell more valuable things individually and group others. Looks like auction houses offer PSA services at a discount. I've seen other options such as selling on consignment or trying to go to a show to talk to dealers in person. I see there are other options like trying to sell some things individually on sites like this.

Any thoughts about the best way to go about this?

So far, his collection includes (not done going thru the boxes) the following, almost all from 1946-1950.
--about 150 autographed government postcards (most don't seem to have huge value but he does have some more notable folks including Cy Young, Joe Jackson, Mel Ott, Roy Campanella, Rogers Hornsby, Wagner Honus, Ed Walsh, Jackie Robinson, etc).
--about 10 programs from both college games and MLB games (including world series)
--a program signed by much of the 1946 Giant's team
--20 Green Books
--about 40 magazines (Sport, Sport Pix, Sportfolio, Sport Life, Baseball Magazine, Baseball Digest, etc)
--about 30 copies of Sports Collectors Digest (1978-81)
--about 20 small paperback books (1946-50)
--Plus he has some random things--stickers, a ticket stub, a few Drake's Cookies baseball cards

Ultimately he would want his collection to go to someone or people who would appreciate what they have. It's been a great experience going thru all this and learning about all these players and learning more about my dad in the process, but I don't have any personal attachment to the actual collection nor much interest in baseball generally, so the collection itself doesn't have a lot of meaning for me. Appreciate any suggestions you all can give me. Thanks in advance.

RufussCkingston

If you are in a major city, maybe Heritage Auctions has an office you can go to and they will weed out the good stuff that is auction worthy to them. Since you don't have the "normal" stuff like signed baseballs or cards, it will be a little more tricky.

jimq

Sorry for your loss! The easiest to sell and ship is going to be the postcards. Are they all GPC? Some that are not are pretty expensive. I just paid $550 for a Cy Young postcard and there are others worth way more than that. My Cy Young was not signed. If yours are signed that helps the value a lot.

You can send the postcards to PSA for authentication with Derrick's group sub the beginning of next year. PSA/DNA authentication helps the value a lot and makes thing easier to sell. Derrick sends them and takes care of everything and no work for you. He's real trustworthy and does a good job. His ID here is raiderguy10.

A lot of your books are going to be hard to sell online because of shipping. The signed program could go with Derrick also to save fees.

If you want to sell any of the stuff take pics and try it in the buy sell trade here. It doesn't cost anything but time and the people here are already sports focused so it's not really like craigslist.

Good Luck!

Nathaniel1960

Agreed on the auction house route. They may also agree to submit the autographed post cards to a third party authentication firm to maximize value: the autographs if authenticated could bring 5 figures easy.

Joe Jackson autographs are extremely rare (some are his wife’s writing) and he passed in 1951. I’ve never seen one in person.

vols1

Do you have pictures of collection? I sell a lot on Facebook. You don’t have the fees and someone can pick it up.

AUandAG

@Nathaniel1960 said:
Agreed on the auction house route. They may also agree to submit the autographed post cards to a third party authentication firm to maximize value: the autographs if authenticated could bring 5 figures easy.

Joe Jackson autographs are extremely rare (some are his wife’s writing) and he passed in 1951. I’ve never seen one in person.

Shoeless Joe was illiterate and not likely personally signed. I'd get that one authenticated and if it's real, your trip was well worth the effort.
bob

nam812

This thread is almost a year old, I wonder how things turned out?

1959

Jenny ?..... Jenny?...... Are you there Jenny?