LITTLE ROCK — North Little Rock collector John Rogers reached an agreement Friday to buy the archives of Sporting News in a deal that he said was valued at $4 million to $5 million. In the past year, Rogers has purchased the photo archives of several newspapers and has built up a collection of 32 million images.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based magazine will retain the copyrights to its 600,000photographs and negatives. Rogers will scan and digitize them for the magazine for free in exchange for the physical prints.Rogers also made a cash payment to the magazine, which is owned by American City Business Journals, though he would not specify the amount.
The magazine’s archives stretch back to 1886 and include many rare, early baseball photos.
“I’m really honored that I’m even associated with the Sporting News collection at this point, and we have a lot of work on our hands,” Rogers said.
“To have all these original images that were used to produce that, I still can’t believe it’s true.”
Rogers can sell the prints to collectors and on eBay, or keep them for hispersonal library.
Shawn Schrager, director of commerce for the Sporting News, said digitizing the images would not have been feasible for the magazine, given the high cost.
“We’re looking at a number of ways to monetize these images,” Schrager said, including selling framed prints or licensing the photos for editorial use in other publications. “There are a number of options on the table right now, but nothing that would have been easy to do unless the archive was digitized.”
Last summer, Rogers made his first major foray into newspaper photo archives, purchasing the roughly 2 million photographs in The Detroit News archives. He has since made similar deals with the Chicago Sun-Times, The Denver Post and the Detroit Free Press.
Once he takes possession of the photographs, Rogers’ U.S. employees, numbering about 50 and most of whom work in North Little Rock, begin cleaning and scanning them. Another 80 workers in India attach additional information about the photographs to the electronic files, such as the name of the photographer, the date and location.
Rogers said that unlike newspaper archives that he has purchased, which chronicle everything from the most ordinary to the most historic of images, all of the Sporting News images are marketable.
Frank Ceresi, who has a Virginia-based firm that advises museums and collectors and who will appraise the photograph collection this summer, estimated that it’s worth millions of dollars.
“John is somebody who I’ve known for many years, and he loves history and loves photos and loves sports inparticular. ... He’s pretty wellversed in American culture,” Ceresi said.
Rogers said the highlight of the collection is 8,000 glassplate negatives by Charles Conlon, who is known for his photos of baseball in the early 20th century, including the famous photograph of Ty Cobb stealing third base in a cloud of dirt.
Schrager said that because the glass plates on which Conlon shot his photographs are so fragile, it has been nearly impossible to use them to create prints. Some of the images have never been seen. But Rogers has access to the kind of technology that will allow the plates to be used to produce the highest-quality images they’ve ever produced, Schrager said.
“You’ll be able to see every pore and every wrinkle in Babe Ruth’s face,” Schrager said.
Rogers said “Charles Conlon is like the Ansel Adams of baseball imagery - he’s the biggest of the big in terms of early baseball images. I have chased Charles Conlon original images in my own personal collection. So to own his original negatives is a dream come true.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/19/2010