By: Amar Shah

You could say this find was the best thing since sliced bread, that is, if sliced bread came with a rare Babe Ruth card inside.

This is a story about wonder and bread. No, not Wonder Bread, but the kind that comes from following a few crumbs and finding something no one knew was still out there. Hidden inside a dusty store ledger, a century-old collection of baseball cards issued by Koester Bread in 1921 has been fermenting for over a hundred years.

In a small town in upstate New York, our consignor, a longtime antiques dealer, went knocking on doors as he had done for nearly 40 years.

“You ever watch American Pickers?” our consignor asks. “I was way ahead of them. I’ve done that since the late ’80s.”

He’d often find himself out in the middle of the country, stopping to talk to people mowing their lawns or sitting on their front porches.

“I just go up to the door and take my chance and knock,” the consignor said. “And I say, hey, I’m in the antiques business. I buy things and this is a sheet that I have. They’ll look at the sheet and I’ve got pictures on it and all the things that I buy. And funny enough, sports cards aren’t on that sheet.”

He would buy old radios, military items, antique signs and toys.

“Just pretty much anything, but I didn’t know enough about sports cards. That’s a whole other realm.”

However, he had collected cards when he was a boy, but in 1972, his area had a flood, and he lost everything.

Years later, that changed one afternoon relatively close to home.

“I just went out one day and I’m driving around upstate New York,” our consignor says. “It’s like 20 miles from me. And I came across this little town and thought, ah, well, this is cool. I’ll start knocking on some doors.”

The album cover of the 1921 Koester Bread set

At one house, he met a family whose grandparents once owned a small general store dating back to the 1890s.

“They invited me in and started showing me things and I bought some stuff from them,” he recounts. “One of the things they showed me was an old journal from this general store.”

Inside the ledger were traces of daily life: old notes, receipts, and a faded photograph of the shop. “Here’s a picture of the store and in the store window is this Koester Bread sign,” he recalls. “Then I opened up this old journal where they kept their sales, I flipped the journal open and here’s this album.”

What he saw stopped him in his tracks: a complete 1921 Koester Bread baseball card album. 

“It says on the cover… you can’t even find that. You can’t even find the album cover anywhere. I mean, it’s not on Google. There’s no record of it. I’ve never seen a record of it in any auction.”

The cards were still attached to the pages. 

“You got the album cover, which is really cool because it says 1921, National and American League pennant, and it says Koester Bread on it. And you open it up and there’s about, I want to say, 15 pages with cards on each page and there’s a little glue on the back, maybe the size of a smaller than a dime. And they’re perfectly in there. Whoever was doing that, it wasn’t a kid.”

Among the 55 cards in the rare 1921 Koester Bread set is the Babe Ruth, which was found on this album page along with Hall of Famer Frank "Home Run" Baker

Believing the album might be worth “a couple hundred bucks,” the consignor bought it on instinct. 

“I just thought it was cool. I didn’t know I had any value.”

When he returned home, curiosity took over. 

“I did start doing a little research on it. When I saw some of the cards, I thought they were put out by American Caramel.”

Wanting to inspect whether these could, in fact, be American Caramel issues, he peeked underneath one of the cards. But alas, the cards were not American Caramel. 

“Ah, crap. This thing’s probably not worth anything.”

But he continued to inspect the album to see if it was something that may have contained some hidden value. 

Then he came across something that gave him hope: a Babe Ruth card. It was a find few collectors have ever encountered in full. The Great Bambino is pitching, his arm is across his chest. He's wearing a Boston uniform. 

“I thought that's so cool.”

He mentioned the find to a friend who urged him to send photos to a card expert. 

“I said, I think I’m going to rip these cards out of the album and sell them individually. And they were like, no, my God, no.”

Thank goodness.

The 1921 Koester Bread (D383) set was issued to commemorate the first all–New York World Series, when the Giants faced the Yankees. Produced by the Koester Bread Baking Company of New York City, the set consists of 52 unnumbered cards evenly divided between the two teams. Each card measures roughly 2 inches by 3½ inches, featuring a black-and-white player portrait within a white border, with the player’s name, position, and team printed in the bottom panel. The backs are blank.

The album the consignor found likely served as a store display premium, given to grocers who sold Koester Bread during the 1921 season, possibly one of only a handful ever distributed.

The set includes players from the New York Yankees and New York Giants, including several Hall of Famers like John McGraw and Hughie Jennings

Koester’s Bakery itself is a fascinating slice of American business history. Founded in 1880 in Baltimore, the company became one of the largest bakeries east of the Mississippi. A 1974 newspaper article by Tom James in The Baltimore Sun described its closing after 94 years in business, noting that the “E.H. Koester Bakery, a Baltimore landmark and once among the largest bakeries east of the Mississippi River, has been sold to Cleveland interests and will close at 4 p.m. tomorrow.”

After sending photos to auction houses, he received an immediate call from REA’s Calvin Arnold, who confirmed the significance of the find. The consignor learned that no complete Koester Bread set had ever surfaced, and that his album, featuring stars like Babe Ruth and Miller Huggins, could be worth a substantial sum.

“I want to tell you, that is an amazing find,” Arnold informed him.

The consignor was stunned.

“Honestly, that’s the first time since I’ve been in business in those almost 40 years now, that I’ve ever bought sports cards.”

He quickly insured the album and shipped it to REA. “It wasn’t in my possession for more than two days.”

“What I keep hearing over and over is the rarity,” the consignor said. “He said, [I’ve] never seen the album, and I’ve never seen the full set.”

This newly discovered complete set in its original album will be a featured item in REA’s Fall Catalog Auction, opening on November 21 and running through December 7.

For someone who’s spent decades uncovering lost Americana, this discovery stands alone. “This is the best thing I’ve ever found. Yeah, without a doubt.”

He still marvels at the odds that led him there.

“It’s all because I was out door knocking that day, and I just happened to cross [the street]. I could have turned right. I could have turned left. I could have skipped this one house, but divine providence had me going to that door, and it just worked out. After all these years, I finally found a treasure.”

For our consignor, this one turned out to be worth more than a little dough.

This story was originally published on Sports Collectors Daily.

Amar Shah is a multiple Emmy-winning writer and producer who has written for ESPN.com, NFL.com, The Wall Street Journal, The Orlando Sentinel, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Slam Magazine and The Washington Post. In the 90s, Amar was a teen sports reporter and got to hang out with the Chicago Bulls during their golden era. He even landed on the cover for Sports Illustrated for Kids with Shaquille O’Neal. His debut novel "The Hoop Con" is now available with Scholastic. You can order it here:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hoop-con-amar-shah/1143287376?ean=9781338840315