If you have followed our posts, you are probably familiar with the chart of “Good Only on Day of Sale” tickets which we presented earlier. We have logged the Day of Sale tickets quite religiously for several decades and it is still surprising to discover a new number and letter combination.
This ticket was on ebay recently as part of an auction with a common admission ticket and the pair sold for something in the $35 range. We would, of course, have considered this ticket alone to be worth more than that due to the fact that it is the only known one. There may well be others out there, but no 5/Y has previously come up for sale or auction that we know of.
We are continuing our research and work on a book about cataloging tickets from the World’s Columbian Exposition and it is a long, slow process. We currently have 781 ticket scans collected, and it both includes some duplicates–and does NOT include many we know of that we do not yet have photos. For example, we do not have photographs collected in this file for all the Day of Sale Tickets, many passes and a great many of the rarer tickets.
We have begun very preliminary planning on how to structure the book and what it might look like–and if we will develop an option for collectors to purchase an online catalog either separate from or along with a printed book.
The very tedious task we’ve only just begun is taking a copy of the only catalog of any kind ever compiled (Doolin, 1980) and listing all of the tickets in a master file overlapping Doolin. His was a remarkably thorough work considering when it was done but it also was little more than a mention of most tickets. We hope to use exhaustive photographs and informational text categorized more expansively than done by Doolin, and a major addition will be a section on passes and other pseudo-tickets never before cataloged.
For now, the above 5/Y is just one of dozens never reported previously that will be in the book down the road a significant distance!
