2012 A Sign of History

Card Review: N/A I'm not counting this as a card.  Instead I'm going with the "collectibles" label that I use for all the odd-ball stuff I don't know how to catagorize.  I'm half tempted to count this as a 1989 Alaska Goldpanners card, as that's what has been cut and slabbed here.

This "card" was sent by a reader (and fellow Wallach fan), Nick in Allen, Texas.  However, it's not the first time I had ever seen this card.  

I vividly remember when this card showed up on ebay.  It caught my attention because at the time the 1989 Alaska Goldpanners was my "most wanted" Wallach card, and one I had been chasing for over 20 years.  So allusive was this Wallach, that I had never even seen a decent picture of it.  This was the first legitimate confirmation I had that the card even existed, and it had been cut into peices.  The listing price was a little higher than I wanted to pay for a card that had been cut into thirds, and drawn on with sharpie (I don't care who did the drawing), so I figured I'd let it go unsold and then lowball the seller with an offer.  Only it sold.  It wasn't that big of a blow, and I more or less forgot about it until it showed up in my mailbox a few years later.  Thanks again Nick.

I'm certain it's the same "card" because this is a 1 of 1 creation.  It says so on the "A Sign of History," website.  I reached out to "A Sign of History" for more information, and here is their response:

Hi Corey,

I would be happy to provide information about our company and cards.   For years I collected in-person autographs, mostly baseball.  As any collector knows sometimes in the process cards get damaged or I had rosters, index cards, programs, etc that I had signed but did not really care to have in my collection.  In 2012 I decided to make these extra/damaged autographs into cut signature cards.  I contracted a printer and purchased holders (like they use for graded cards) and started A Sign of History.  The initial release was a huge success and I had customers e-mailing me about rarity and if they could send their own autographs in to be made into cuts.  So in response the 2013 and 2014 releases are all 1/1 cards (only 1 was made for each player) and we created the Custom Cut Program in which customers can send authenticated autographs in for us to make into cut signature cards.  So far we have produced over 10,000 cards and continue to grow as our customer base expands.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Thanks,
Matt Moser
A Sign of History 


Autographs aren't really my thing to begin with, and I am unapologetic fan of well worn, beat to hell, vintage cards, but I can certainly see how a good number of collector's would be into this.  In any event, I have no trouble adding this item to my collection.  If hadn't managed to track down actual copies of the 1989 Alaska card, I'd probably feel differently about the lone copy in my collection being cut to pieces.  But thats no longer the case.