GUEST: I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and one of my friends bailed on the program in 1968 and he brought me these posters. Actually, he brought me a big stack of what he called junk paper.

APPRAISER (laughs)

GUEST: And I treated it as junk paper, and my wife saw this, said, "I think we ought to mount them, put them on the wall." So for 45 years, they've been on our guest room wall. The poster closest to you shows Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine trying to win the fish of the presidency. And there's a huge amount of tangled line, and it says, "New York." And in this poster, it was printed after the election of 1884, and apparently it was designed to commemorate the outcome of the election. Grover Cleveland wins the fish, or the presidency, and James G. Blaine skulks off as the loser.

APPRAISER: That's right, and New York had 36 electoral votes, there were over a million votes cast, and Cleveland won by just over 1,000. So it was a very, very close election. And these prints were done, as you said, right after the election, and it's called "The Great National Fishing Match." Here they are contesting the presidency, and there is the result. And it was a very bitter campaign. Cleveland was actually from Buffalo. He started as a lawyer there, and within four years, went from a lawyer in Buffalo to president of the United States. And these prints were both done by the Courier Lithographic Company of Buffalo. They were published by M. Lee, and M. Lee is not somebody who's turned up anywhere else. So it was probably something, Lee was probably a supporter of Cleveland, and it was sort of a "nah, nah, nah" to the Republicans.

GUEST (chuckles): Yeah.

APPRAISER: And what's interesting about that is, there was another one of those in the same election, because one of the reasons it was close-- Cleveland was supposed to win. But the report came out that he was having an affair with a woman in Buffalo and may have had a child. And the Republicans said, "Ma, ma, where's my pa?" during the election.

GUEST (chuckles)

APPRAISER: Well, after the election, the Democrats came back with, "Gone to the White House, ha ha ha."

GUEST (laughs)

APPRAISER: So this is much the same kind of thing, there was a lot of bitterness. A supporter from Buffalo is saying, "Well, look, we won." My guess is they would have been hung up in bars or Democratic clubs, where they would put them up, and everybody'd go... (cackling) Something like that. They probably didn't run off a huge number of them. Maybe 500 to 1,000 were done. How many survive is, uh, very rare. I mean, you said you found one, right?

GUEST: I have seen this poster, which is the aftermath, and that's probably the one the Democrats love the most. I've never seen this one anywhere.

APPRAISER: And where did you see that one?

GUEST: Library of Congress.

APPRAISER: Library of Congress, and T.J. Nicholl, he was the artist-- he was a cartoonist. Couldn't find any record of him doing any other prints, so he may have worked for a local firm. Now, do you have a sense of what they might be worth?

GUEST: I worked as a historian for many years, and yesterday, my wife and I had a guessing game that, if we got this far...

APPRAISER: Okay.

GUEST: I said, "$100 or less." She said $1,000, and our son in Singapore said $500.

APPRAISER (laughs)

GUEST: So there's the range in our family.

APPRAISER: Okay, well, your wife is a little sharper than you are. (laughs) I guess –

GUEST: she always is.

APPRAISER: If these were in a retail environment, I would think something on the order of $1,400 to $1,600 for the pair. Now, that includes the fact they're not in good shape. They're rare enough, and they're appealing enough to collectors, that that really doesn't matter.

GUEST: I'm delighted that we have kept them for 45 years.