The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card

Since its limited release just after the turn of the twentieth century, this American Tobacco cigarette card has beguiled and bedeviled collectors. First identified as valuable in the 1930s, when the whole notion of card collecting was still young, the T206 Wagner has remained the big score for collectors who have scoured card shows, flea markets, estate sales, and auctions for the portrait of baseball's greatest shortstop.

Only a few dozen T206 Wagners are known to still exist. Most, …