In a former antique shop off a four-lane highway in rural Virginia, Tim Banazek knelt before a white banker’s box labelled “Autographed Baseballs” that was stashed at the bottom of a steel bookcase. He pulled the first ball out and examined the signature in the fluorescent light. It was Willie Mays’s.

“Look at this!” Banazek shouted. “Look at this!”

He pulled out another ball. “Stan Musial!”

Another. “Bob Feller!”

Every day, it seems, Banazek unearths new historic treasures from a collection of sports cards and memorabilia that he purchased in 2021 from a quiet hobbyist who lived in a neighbouring town.

But this is not just any assemblage. It is quite possibly the largest private collection of sports cards in the world — and probably by a wide margin. Banazek estimates that it includes 20 million cards, although other visitors have pegged the number even higher. For comparison, Paul Jones, a man in Idaho who claimed to have the largest private baseball card collection, told a local newspaper in 2020 that his holdings amounted to 2.8 million cards.

What makes the collection even more notable is its lack of public profile. For years, it sat in a concrete outbuilding behind a low-slung ranch house on a wooded country road.

Two members of the reclusive seller’s family said that the collection had been painstakingly accumulated over more than 50 years and that the seller had “purchased whole collections from other buyers at times”. They declined to answer questions provided by email, other than to say, “We are happy that the collection went to someone who appreciates and enjoys the collection.” Banazek declined to disclose how much he had paid for the collection and said he did not even know everything it contained, making estimating a total value for it very difficult.

Now that he owns it, the collection is stowed in an otherwise empty-looking roadside storefront 40km outside Richmond, with paper taped over the windows. Cards in thin white boxes — known in the card-collecting hobby world as “3,000-count boxes” — drown a 1,000-square-foot storeroom from floor to ceiling, and there are three other rooms bursting with cards, too.

The collection includes at least every Topps baseball set produced from 1954 to 2016, as well as roughly three decades’ worth of completed sets of basketball and football cards. There are an estimated 10,000 Michael Jordan cards, 6,000 Kobe Bryant cards and 4,000 LeBron James cards. There are at least five different Babe Ruth cards, not to mention Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio cards; authenticated tobacco cards of Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and others from the T206 and T205 set (1909 and 1911); hundreds of signed balls and bats; rolled-up sheets of uncut cards; and game-used catching gear worn by the Hall of Famer Bill Dickey.

The collection of artefacts extends well beyond sports and includes original and authenticated postcards of Marilyn Monroe from the 1950s; sealed boxes of cards from Star Trek, Star Wars and Pokemon; and turn-of-the-century cigarette cards featuring images of stage actors popular at the time. Some of the collection is stored in literal shoe boxes. Other sets are sealed in their original packaging.

Banazek has tried to catalogue the chaos, but he suspects he has opened only 5 to 10 per cent of it, leaving the tantalising possibility of ever-rare gems yet to be discovered. His friend Darren Wieder started inventorying the cards with a scanner and stopped after about 80,000.

“There are boxes and boxes of cards that are the ones with uniform pieces, bat pieces, signed pieces, and we haven’t even gone through that,” Wieder said.

Banazek, 53, bounces from box to box like a child who just discovered the keys to a candy warehouse. “It’s so much fun,” he said.

Banazek is the founder and chief executive of ISC Sales. During the coronavirus pandemic, feeling bored and somewhat nostalgic, he purchased boxes of baseball cards from the early 1980s and posted photos about it on Facebook. After one post, he said, the parent of a former teammate on his daughter’s soccer team reached out. “She said, ‘You’ve got to come see my dad’s collection,’” Banazek recalled.

The house was only about 15 minutes from where Banazek lived. He described entering the collection as being like walking through a canyon flanked by a sheer face of stacked boxes. “It’s just wall to wall with banker’s boxes just filled with cards,” Banazek said.

New York Times News Service