DALLAS, TX.- Of all of the examples that support the adage "the sum is greater than the whole of its parts," the Thomas Jacob Archive is among the best. Some of the top items in Jacob's trove will be available Feb. 25-26 in Heritage Auctions' Platinum Night Sports Collectibles Catalog Auction in Dallas.

When baseball fans across the country slipped into a state of shock with the 1939 announcement that legendary New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig had to retire because of his affliction with the disease that later bore his name, a young Boston-area boy sent a letter to "the Iron Horse," asking him to sign a sheet Jacob had made on which to collect the autographs of players who had won American League Most Valuable Player awards. After receiving the letter, in which Jacob asked Gehrig to sign his name in the spots for the 1927 and 1939 awards, Gehrig wrote back but included autographs indicating he actually had won four MVP awards, and a fifth at the bottom of the hand-written letter on the back of the sheet in which he pointed out that he had won four awards (est. $40,000+). Both were right: Gehrig had won the Baseball Writers Association's awards in 1927 and 1939, but also was honored as the AL's top player two other times by The Sporting News. Very few autographs signed after Gehrig's emotional retirement speech are known to exist.

Another one of the gems in the Jacob Archive is a 1939 Baseball Hall of Fame Inaugural Class Team-Signed Sheet (est. $40,000+), which is part of a 20-page collection of autographs, the most significant of which features a list of autographs by Baseball Hall of Fame enshrinees that Jacob collected by painstakingly contacting each player through the mail. He titled the page "Baseball's Hall of Fame" and then mailed it to the players, requesting that the players would autograph the page and then return it. The names of those whose signatures adorn the page read like a Mount Rushmore of baseball's greatest players from the first half of the 20th century: Grover C. Alexander, Eddie Collins, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Napoleon Lajoie, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Honus Wagner and Cy Young.

Very few autographs signed by the Iron Horse after his heartbreaking farewell exist in the collecting community, but those rare and important signatures represent just a small portion of the intrigue that this special archive contains. From MVP's to executives, from team sheets to inaugural class Hall of Fame rosters, this remarkable labor of love brings the 1939 Centennial baseball season to life unlike any collection we've encountered. It's unquestionably one of the most important autograph archives to surface in the hobby.