Never get tired of this photo. Still don't know what he was doing, or why but it's hilarious. This card, the E77 Kaufman with half his top inexplicably missing, the E79 Sharkey 'bare ass', there's some funny old pictures and artwork.

Cards 148 and 149 in my master set. Overpaid a little, but that's okay as it's getting less common to spot the combinations I still need, and this is the most difficult set to trade for as nobody cares about the 10 backs and the checklist is annoying to compare to collections.

Unnumbered, but the golds are given as having a print run of 9 from the 2010 Ringside issue. I won the three eBay listings from the big run listed for the fighters from my collecting era for just a few bucks. Love the Turkey Red's.

Jackie Brown - Daily Dispatch
 

This just arrived today after a few weeks in the mail. I have no idea if these are relatively common, or not. I just found it pretty interesting. I would guess circa 1932 -1934 due to this was when he was the Flyweight champion. It looks like he fought Young Perez on a couple of different occasions.

46/50 Tolstoi backs down, and 628/632 for what I suspect is every printed front/back combination. All the toughies, recognized and unrecognized, are done, just waiting for the last Tolstoi's I need to come up again and finish this one.

They aren't easy Chad, but as is the case with so many boxing cards, rare and obscure go hand in hand. I have one I got several years ago. Haven't seen too many others. Is it in Seconds Out?

Greg, those gold Ringsides are nice. I picked up several of them for very cheap about two years ago. I think the company did itself a disservice by not formally numbering them.

Nelson was $1.25, the Turkey's $6.50. Kind of a shame this set evidently failed on the market, as far as I am aware it is the last serious attempt at a real boxing card set. We may never get another one.

I just checked my copy; Jones didn't have this card listed in Seconds Out.

Turkey Reds
 

If I recall correctly the Turkey Reds came in three colors. I believe they were red, gold and black. The gold and red each came in two different poses. I’ve only seen the black in a single pose.

The onyx black cards were 1/1s. I bought one of them but I can't find a scan, so here's a gold one instead:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...eld%20GOLD.jpg

I like the base design, but the Turkey's are right up my alley with the T9 fronts and the T220 backs. I really like the Onyx 1/1's but I haven't seen a Onyx Turkey come up for sale for one of the old timers that fits in with my collection. Hopefully one day, I'd like to get one as a type example. I have no idea what they would be worth; there are apparently less than 9 people that really care about the golds.

Most of the fighters have 2 cards, but some of the old timers only have 1 card, like Jeffries and Corbett.

Turkey Reds
 

These are the 5 Johnson cards in the set. I’m guessing they consider these the side pose and the front pose, kinda like the T218 cards. I purchased these years ago when they first came out. I have a couple of scans where Gary sold a graded pair of the Johnson red types a few months ago for 85 a piece. The onyx Johnson was a bit pricey back when I purchased it from EBay. From my records I purchased it back in 2011.

The Hawk!
 

I grew up a couple of hours outside of Cincinnati and was a big fan of “The Hawk”. He was the coolest, in my opinion. He was always looked at like the villain, but he was always willing to talk to fans. After he retired for many years I would see him at Reds fest in Cincinnati every November. He and his wife would always have a table set up next to one of the old Reds greats. I definitely miss those days.

Picked it up a few months ago, but just got it back from being graded.

Not sure I would call this a true 'card', but it's a cool item of an underrated great.

Those UD lenticulars are amazing cards, just light years ahead of the 1960s-1970s 3-D cards. I picked up a Chavez back when they were released and the depth and quality of the illusion is incredible. I literally had to touch the surface to show my eye that it did not have real depth.

That's definately a card!

Pulled out of a box this morning, so a nice box in my eye. Didn't get the relic card it guarantees alongside 1 auto, but got a 2nd auto instead. Sadly, the second one is a redemption for Dave Kingman that expired in 2016. The other box I opened had a Bouton auto and Gene Tierney relic, plus a image variant of Jerry West, which I think were pretty tough. Shame Golden Age died after 3 years, I think it was Panini's best issue.

Sometimes I think I might be wiser to open everything upon receipt instead of keeping a stash of boxes in my closet to open when the mood strikes.

Nothing crazy here. Love these legends!

I guess as you get more 'advanced' (age and card collecting), it takes a bit more to interest you:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...er%20Proof.jpg

N28 or A16 proof. Only one I've ever seen. It surfaced for sale years ago, vanished into a collection, then popped up in the April Lelands auction. It's pretty amazing looking in hand; wish it was a Sullivan :D

That is super awesome! Is it standard Ginter thickness or thin like a album cut?

it is thin but not skinned. David Rudd (Cycleback) documented the proof years ago. It is on his web site.

Here's more nuttiness from the same Lelands lot:

I was scanning the A16-A17 stuff from the lot and noticed something odd:

Here is an A16 page:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ize/img922.jpg

Typical. Now, here is a Joe Lannon cut:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...nnon%20Cut.jpg

Notice anything? Let me put them side by side:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...Comparison.jpg

Yup, the A16 doesn't cut down to a clean card. Also, the name is black on the A16 and brown on the cut. Hmm. Since there was a proof in the lot I thought maybe I had more proofs. Then I looked closely at the edges of the three 'A16' boxer cuts in the lot. All of them have borders that do not match the colors of the backgrounds on the A16 sheets. What has matching colors around the borders of the cards?

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...20Heritage.jpg

What I have is a cut from the G20 poster, not an A16 album. I checked the other two cuts and they also have brown type and do not match their A16 pages, so they are G20 cuts too:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...van%20Cuts.jpg

Since there are only a few of the posters known, these cuts are rare as well. I can't fault Lelands for missing this, it is really subtle and I did not see it until I was putting the cuts over the images on the album pages to see if the cuts were full sized, but who the heck collected this group of A16-A17 pages, G20 cuts and a proof, and did they know what they had?

But it gets even better than that. There were four cuts from the 2nd series album, allegedly. An anomaly on one of the Jack McGee cuts caught my eye:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...21%20McGee.jpg

The black print on the right side. It matches the McGee on the 2nd series poster where the La Blanche overlaps:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...OC%20McGee.png

The 2nd McGee of the lot was cut narrower but in hand you can just see the tip of the corner of the La Blanche image. The Kerrigan and Patsey Duffy also match the poster's background colors. In other words, they are G21 cuts.

Awesome stuff. Poster cuts can be really tough; I have some I’ve been trying for years to even find any other copies of known. Fun complement to a set

Want some G20 and G21 cuts, I'm game.

Emailed you.

I have some T68 poster cuts from a poster otherwise unknown; some T29's from what I suspect was a thick cardboard display otherwise unknown, and this Tommy Ryan that is clearly from some kind of poster type product (not skinned, very different front stock to a normal card). This kind of stuff is fun to slot in alongside a set, a way to keep collecting after finishing a 'set'.

I remember the unique T227 poster cuts that appeared awhile back, those were pretty neat. Don't know where they ended up. There's presumably a number of still unknown posters that existed for these T and N sets waiting to be found.

Which is amazing to consider: 150 years down the line we still don't have this stuff fully catalogued.

It really is. 150 years of collecting, and about 50 years now since card collecting went mainstream in the sense that the general public has been aware that old cards can equal lots of $$$. But every year, we still find some stuff that nobody has seen before in the hobby. On the flip side, there's certainly a lot of great cards that were made but no copies survive today for us to find.




Since it's the pickup thread and I haven't been posting a pickup, here's a recent pickup from a friend of a card that went 96 years before being 'discovered'. It's the worst of the 5 known, but it's my desk card for the month. I'll crack it out when I file it away with my cards.

Speaking of cuts from unknown posters, there's this one with the N266 images that's never been resolved:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...014%20N266.jpg

And here's the common ones seen, with no mystery to it:

Cards 35-38 for my set. Maybe it's just perception, but it really seems the percentage of cards graded in this set is abnormally high. Almost every card has had to be a crack out.

Hayes is one of the handful of boxers in the set who wasn't in T218. His rights were also used for T225-2, which is similarly rare though much less popular. Coulon was the best of the fighters, the Bantam champion for a few years.

I have cards 39 and 40 in the mail right now; 46 is probably the closest I will come. The heavy SP'ing and price bonus of the 5 black fighters makes it unlikely I will finish this set anytime soon. When I get to 46 I might look into having some reprints made of the other 4 so that I can use a binder without holes in it.

And #39 arrived today. Harry Lewis was probably the welterweight world champion when this set was issued. He found multiple opponents in a single day multiple times. He took the welterweight title in 1908, just three years after leaving the featherweight ranks. Lewis was once charged with manslaughter after he knocked out an opponent whose head hit the mat and died, the cased ended up in a fine. He relinquished the title to move to middleweight, and claimed he was a title holder in the chaos in the division left by Ketchell's death. I think his claim to the middleweight crown is rather dubious. His card is a common in every set he appears in, but he was a great boxer. Unlike baseball, great athletes can be had for the price of a common in boxing, which I appreciate.

Picked up a set not long ago, but that means I need all the cards again, with the other variation. Dempsey, sans lithographer line, crossed off. Love the backdrop art.

4 more T219's for my master set. Coulon and Jeannette are HLC Green backs, knocking me up to 44 of them. Klaus and Neil are Miners Extra's numbers 48 and 49, with only Jack (Twin) Sullivan to go of which there have been a couple overpriced ones on eBay sitting forever. Not quite that desperate yet...

Coulon was the Bantam champion when this set was issued. Klaus would take the middleweight title in a year or two. Jeannette was a heavyweight contender. Neil's career was over when the set came out but had been a bantam world champion years before.

Some progress in the N310 master set. I love the Bobby Burns name at bottom in the top left. PSA has the wrong year and the wrong fighter on their slip. There is no Tommy Burns in the set, Tommy was about 13-14 when this set was issued. It takes no research at all to know this set isn't from 1890; as the Corbett card bears a copyright date of 1894.

O'Donnell fought for middle and heavyweight titles in Australia and fought most of the top heavies of his time. He traveled with James Corbett as a sparring partner and exhibition opponent in the demonstrations popular at that time.

Myers was apparently the fastest running boxer of his time. He fought for some regional belts and he once held the great Jack McAuliffe to a draw in over 60 rounds in an 1889 fight for the lightweight title. That would seem to suggest he must have been a very good fighter. The original photograph this was based on has a man in the background and is more of a forest scene that has been redone for the Mayo card.

Nice pickups Greg.

Tommy Burns...WTF?

On N310, talk about taking liberties with the artwork, they removed Hall's moustache. Here is one of the misprinted cards w/o the artwork and it shows him with stache; the sfache is gone on the full artwork card

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...310%20Hall.jpg

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...comparison.jpg

These no-art ones are really rare. I am sooo pissed I passed on a Walcott at a show about 15 years ago.

Sometimes, it's almost like PSA has no idea what they're grading in boxing land. Sometimes I wish the graders just wouldn't do boxing; they struggle to even separate T218 and T220 for the subjects in both series even though the cards look completely different. They generally get it right in baseball, but boxing none of them seem to know anything about and shouldn't be authenticating such items.

This set is really difficult for me to checklist. There's multiple versions of the name at bottom cards, black-and-white's that are really rare, versions betraying some of the sepia but missing some 'layers' or some elements of the artwork, versions that are so heavily redone that they are a much darker reddish. There's at least 4-5 of what seem to be different types, maybe more, and separating some of them between what is just natural variance in printing a large run and what is the result of a genuine printing difference is difficult. For now I'm trying to do a set of 70 (35 name at top, 35 name at bottom) alongside however many very-different-looking cards I can find. Probably worth a full thread looking at each variant at some point. I'm struggling to ID a true master set's checklist still.

Picked these up off the BST about two weeks ago. They were listed as 1922 Caramelos la Colmena. Has anyone ever seen any other cards from this issue before?

4 contenders and gatekeepers for the heavyweight crown for my 70 card Mayo run.

Choyinski/Chonskia was a friend of Jack Johnson and a very small heavy who beat Johnson, Maher, fought draws with Jeffries and Sharkey.

Maher claimed the title in 1895 rather dubiously. He lost to most of the big heavies and beat a number of them, apparently hit hard as hell but had a weak chin.

Mitchell was a hyped up challenger for two of John L. Sullivan's big bouts, and held him to a draw in the second contest. He lost to Corbett as well.

Godfrey had a mostly losing record against significant competition. Fought Kilrain, Choyinski, Peter Jackson and others.

The set would be from Spain; doesn't look like them, though.

https://www.classicsoccercards.com/p...tistas-de-cine

150 out of 250 down. The early 1910 Jeffries card uses a pre-Johnson fight prep picture. This issue is almost certainly the first of the ATC boxing issues.

That photo is actually from around 1899. He had hair

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...0by%20Hall.jpg

A few years later, not so much

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ize/img599.jpg

By 1909

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...e/Jeffries.jpg

Scary, isn't it?

Agreed that it doesn't resemble any of the soccer issues there, but I'm kinda lost as to what other set they could be from then.

No way to know for sure. There are so many uncatalogued or barely catalogued issues from countries other than the USA and UK. I've got prewar types from all over Europe that have zero information.

An E78. Not a pretty one, but they are fairly tough.

More Mayo's, getting closer to a 70 card run. The Van Heest is an excellent example of the toning variations in the name at bottom cards. Carney and Plimmer next to him are not the super tough true black and white versions, they just have the slight sepia filter instead of the red one on Van Heest here. The number of actual different versions is still a mystery to me as it becomes hard to separate the less obvious ones.

Edwards and Carney are the 'good ones' in my eye as they appeared in the T220 silver series. Griffo, Plimmer and Edwards held legitimate claims to world championships in their weight classes. Carney was the lightweight champion of England for a time in the 1880's.

Fitzsimmons, x2. The cards are from around the time he vacated the Middleweight world title to fight at Heavyweight.

Added a C52 of Bert Keyes. Puts me at 93 down, not an easy set. Keyes was one the east coasters in the no decision era who has a small record if you look up his W/L credits, but appears to have been fighting almost constant 6 round bouts. He fought Summers, Murphy, Hyland, Cross, McFarland, Baldwin, Frayne, Marto and pretty much every other lightweight who appears in the sets of this time.

Attell is Red Sun #40 out of 46 I think are doable. Happy to see this one popped up for a reasonable price.

I picked up a complete set of these 1914 Farmer Burns booklets:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ize/img942.jpg

Looking to sell them, if anyone is interested.

McCoy was an upgrade for my set, only have 1 or 2 creased cards left to upgrade. On the down side one my few that needs an EX/EXMT upgrade is the Donovan, so I'm going to be looking for a few decades :rolleyes:

T218 number 629 out of 632, Abe Goodman with a Tolstoi back. Only 3 cards to go

Got a batch with 16 different silver's in it, out of 25 different.

Nice. That Gans is one of my favorite T cards.

And the extras from the lot. Nothing as cool as Gans showing off his best martial arts moves, but I like Coburn's card for the mystery of the background man and why they bothered to remove him.

Gotta throw in the original Gans photo

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ans_%20Joe.jpg

"My kung fu is mightier than yours."

4 more premium Mayo's, getting close to a 70 card full set of the 2 main types.

Corbett is one of the better cards in the set, and cool because he dates the set to c. 1894-1895. No other card has a copyright line. SGC is able to read that copyright line and use it to date the card, but they are unable to extrapolate the seemingly obvious that all of the other cards don't predate Corbett by 4 years. Dixon was the featherweight champion of the world when this set was issued, and the only card in the series showing gloves (32 of the cards feature a fighter with his fists up facing the same direction, 3 have an arms crossed pose). Kilrain is famous for his fight with Sullivan and carries a modest premium. It is a shame there are so few boxing sets from the 19th century that are realistically completable for most collectors; Mayo's are pretty much the only one with more than a handful of cards in the set that are a realistic goal.

The Dixon seems to clearly be in worse shape than the 1.5 Corbett Name at Bottom, but this is why I'm not a professional grader.

https://createauctioncdn.azureedge.n...7_1_337288.jpg


This one hurt to sell, but it wasn't in my future collection plans, so off it went to REA for the current auction.

4 T219's, all with the green Honest Long Cut backs. This puts me at 48/50 on that back, and at 157/200 for the true T219 Master Set.

I can't figure out how the hell the bidding on Adam's Joe Chonskia SGC EX+ 70 is so low.

My favorite boxing card, probably for the last time I'll get to post one in a pickup thread. Mike is propped up on my desk for awhile. The odds I will secure another copy are probably very low as the known copies have consolidated. This is my pinnacle of boxing SP's since Graziano is out of my league.

P.S. - I am still looking for a picture of, or proof that, the James J. Corbett T220 Silver slabbed PSA 2 is real and exists and is not a labelling error of the Young Corbett.

3 more silvers. The Randall/Belasco is one of the cards with a thin layer of the silver over the caption. It has proven awfully confusing to me how the names were actually printed in this series. Some cards they are printed as one might expect, a single printing of the name on top of the silver (though all other black on the card was printed only BEFORE the silver application). It is not particularly rare to find cards like this though, where there is definitely a thin layer of the silver over the name. If they ran the sheet, applied the silver metallic layer, then printed the captions on top, I would expect that we would find a not insignificant amount of cards showing a shifted caption from the sheet not being 100% perfectly centered every time they ran it. Yet, I've never found even 1 card like that.

The Dempsey is the closest I have come to a miscut T220 Silver; the back inner frame is tough the border, just a quarter mm from showing the adjacent card.

The Burke is just a Burke, but it's a great picture so I got him too.

Last of the Mayo's for awhile, I expect. After cracking these out and closely examining, I still cannot find a mark on Hall that PSA notated. Not that it matters much in this grade, but I was curious. Usually with the right angle you can make a subtle mark appear clearly present, but I came up empty. The damage between his legs is paper loss, not a mark.

McAuliffe was a great lightweight world champion. Hall was an excellent fighter who was a rival of Fitzsimmons and tried and failed to take Dempsey's MW crown after their bout was cancelled because Hall got into a fight and was stabbed. Daly was a decent fighter who was a sparring partner for Corbett and Jeffries later in his career, and also wrestled.

One more T225 down for the master, 151/250 scratched off.

Formerly an SGC 1.5. Thankfully PSA certified that the SGC slab was authentic and let me have my card to then destroy said certified slab. James J. was getting damaged by the slab, with the top wall of the black insert intruding over the top of the card and the top edge stuck under it. He's rescued from the casket and added to my set. 41/50 crossed off, 9 to go of which 4 are basically impossible to find.

94/109 into the largely boxing-collected C52's now. Plus a Silver, just because.

Very happy to have secured a Red Sun recently. How tough are these? I've heard they are very hard to find.


.

Nice pick. Red Suns are tough, but not truly rare. They’re available with patience. If I had to guess there’s probably a bit less than 50 of each of the white guys around. The same ones seem to keep rotating, entering the market over and over every couple of years. The grading rate for this issue appears, from my subjective experience, to be abnormally high for a boxing issue.

Surprised to win this; Greg Morris had it listed at Vg-VGEX even though it has at least 16 different creases and when he overgrades people usually pay up. Thankfully they didn't and so I got it at a fair price. It is hard to beat the N43's for aesthetic value. Frank Murphy's only other cards are his rare N332 SF Hess and the small size version of this set, N29. Ike Weir claimed the Featherweight title after fighting Murphy to a draw over 80 rounds that both men severely wounded.

N43’s are beautiful cards and I think tougher than people realize compared to the smaller A&G issues. Not a lot of star power (at least on the boxing side), so they tend to be overlooked.

Delete

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Thanks Greg. Good to get the viewpoint of an experienced boxing collector as I have little to no experience with Red Suns to date. Was just thrilled to get this one though. I really want the Attell of course. Someday, right?



.

Someday! If it helps the search and value, I paid $250 for a PSA 1 Attell in May of this year. He carries a deserved premium but thankfully it's not too big. It's nice there is a T card using the real photo that was the basis for his T9, T218, T219, T225, C52 etc. Love these Red Suns.

Don't tell people how much tougher they are ;). All of the 20 cigarette Ginters are just gorgeous expansions of the 10 pack cards. I'm thinking about putting together one of the bird sets or something that will be much lighter on the wallet than sets with baseball players or Indian chiefs.

Happy to have been offered this batch of Dixie's for my set. Dixie Queens are pretty tough, and with the evidence that has emerged the last few years I am no longer sure they should really be categorized as a different set from T220. 29/50 down, I have to do them now that I have the T220 master.

My T220 set is finally complete
 

Picked these up at different times, but they all just came back from SGC today:

Nice. Are you mixing the silvers and whites or do you have a set of each?

If you build one border color, you have to build the other!

And then, you need to add the Tolstoi's too for a bit more fun.

At that point you might as well get both Mecca factories.