MOSELEY, VA.- In a former antique shop off a four-lane highway in rural Virginia, Tim Banazek knelt before a white banker’s box labeled “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’.

“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 neighboring 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. The largest collection of nonsports trading cards consists of 32,809 items, according to Guinness World Records.

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.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to protect the seller’s identity, 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 difficult.

Now that he owns it, the collection is stowed in an otherwise empty-looking roadside storefront 25 miles outside Richmond, Virginia, with paper taped over the windows. The New York Times is the first news media outlet to see it in its entirety, though Banazek hopes many more will see it soon. 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 Hall of Famer Bill Dickey.

The collection of artifacts 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, fossilized bubble gum still sitting in packs.

Banazek has tried to catalog the chaos, but he suspects he has opened only 5% to 10% of it, leaving the tantalizing 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. “Some of that stuff could be worth a fortune. We don’t know.”

Banazek, 53, is a chipper, high-energy father of three who, in the showrooms, bounces from box to box like a child who just discovered the keys to a candy warehouse.

“It’s so much fun,” he said.

Joe Marrs, an independent appraiser of card collections based in Chicago, visited Banazek’s acquisition in 2022. It’s not unusual for private individuals to quietly amass enormous stockpiles over decades in the hobby, he said. Still, he had never seen anything like the collection in Virginia.

“The sheer magnitude was just crazy,” Marrs said. “Within the last six months, I saw a collection that was probably 200,000 cards, which was maybe 60 or 70 of those white boxes. That was a very large collection. A really, really big collection might be a million cards, and this one is 40 times that or something. It’s just incomprehensible.”

Banazek is the founder and CEO of ISC Sales, a distributor for Walgreens, CVS, Joann’s and other retailers, based in Virginia. 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. “It was so cool.”

It was also a total mishmash; if the boxes were curated, it wasn’t immediately evident how. But the collection — all of it — was for sale, and another potential buyer was flying in to see it, Banazek said he had been told. He pulled the trigger.

“I was the proud owner of 20 to 30 million-plus baseball cards,” he said.

The first question was how to move them. Banazek called Wieder, who showed up to the house in a three-row Lincoln Navigator SUV. “We fill the whole thing up,” Wieder said, “and I’m like, wow, we didn’t make much of a dent.”

It took Banazek and Wieder 20 car trips as well as three 15-foot U-Hauls and two 20-foot U-Hauls to move everything into the empty antique store they had leased nearby. They purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of display racks at a discount from a Best Buy liquidation sale. A rough count found 48 display racks, a 12-foot-high wooden bookcase and dozens of other shelves, cabinets, stands and desks. Boxes of cards still crowded the aisles between racks.

Marrs said placing a value on the collection was difficult because of the possibility that some rare, extremely valuable cards could be lurking somewhere. “You have to factor that in,” he said, adding that $5 million was a conservative estimate, based on what he had seen.

Unlike the previous owner, Banazek does not shy away from publicity and is now considering ways to showcase his card heaven to a wider audience. He is teaming up with Rob Smith, a former executive at Endemol Shine who helped produce reality television programs like “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and “Wipeout.” Smith said he had various ideas about how to showcase the collection, including taking it on a tour as an interactive exhibit, perhaps culminating with a residency in Las Vegas.

“To me, this is a perfect family-friendly thing where you can go and enjoy and see all these amazing things we have,” Smith said, “as well as the history of card collecting, the history of America.”

He has solicited help from various business partners, including John Skipper, a former ESPN executive, now at Meadowlark Media.

“Tim and Rob were kind enough to show me the collection,” Skipper said. “It is truly amazing, an earthly garden of cardly delights. It is not only vast physically; it is psychically profound.”

Other potential projects include a podcast built around the stories behind different cards and a reality show in which people could be reconnected to long-lost cards or even reunited with family members via the cards.

“Everyone dreams of finding that one box in the attic,” Smith said. “Tim found thousands of them.”

Banazek said he was still going through boxes and binders almost daily but had no intention of selling the cards or even knowing every card that was in there.

“I don’t want to discover everything,” Banazek said. “There’s the discovery writ large, which is amazing, and it gets my heart palpitating. But it’s what’s still in there that’s fun. Let’s have fun.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.