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.


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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.

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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?



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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.

Just a set of whites. Not really trying for a set of silvers. Even if money was no object, the big two just don't come up for sale often enough to tempt me to try.

Recently picked up these two W529s. I think the O'Dowd is a type 6 and the Britton is a type 7. Can anyone confirm this for me please? I really like these "big head" boxing cards and was thrilled to get these from a Greg Morris auction. I never seem to win his auctions. (I'm too cheap I think ;) )




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Looks right.

Speaking of rare Mike Donovan's...

Acquired from the BST. I like Mike Donovan stuff since his T220 Silver is my favorite card and he has very few cards of any kind. This is larger than an Imperial Cabinet. 7 9/16's wide and 9 and 15/16's tall, just a hair smaller than an 8x10.

This might be the picture used on Donovan's T220 from wave 2, portraying him in his prime as a boxer instead of as an old man. It's just a hair different, the orientation of the clenched fist, slightly different angle of the foot. The differences may be artistic license or it may have been based on a photograph that is almost the same as this but not quite.

Great shot in that size. I assume that's a large albumen photo attached to the mount. Saw that when it was posted and thought it was a great shot and pretty good deal.

Did you get the large Muldoon that was offered also?

Yeah, it’s a really big albumen photograph glued to the Wood backing just like a normal cabinet or CDV. This isn’t my real area, I have a number of historical cabinets and a few boxers, so this size is new to me. I’m not sure what these are called, it’s significantly bigger than an Imperial Cabinet Card.

I did not get the Muldoon, as he’s posed as a wrestler and I have to draw lines somewhere. That one has a better picture though and I saved a scan. Shame this one has the liquid damage and some fading. I’ve had a Donovan cabinet on my want list for a long time. I hadn’t seen one before, he was retired by the time cabinets became popular so I wasn’t sure if there was one.

Are there other J. Wood ~8x10 boxers?

According to David Rudd's guide it can fall into either the Imperial Cabinet or simply the Mounted Photo category at that size.

He also seems to think most in this size are actually silver/gelatin prints rather then albumen. Albumen's of this size could be made but were a bit too fragile to be practical. They exist but are rare.

Not sure I've seen other J. Woods of this size (or I can't remember), though I'm sure they're out there somewhere. I'd imagine there's at least a few large Sullivans kicking around.

Nice cabinet. Imperial cabinet is often used for anything larger then a regular size cabinet. Also over sized cabinet is another terminology. Yes there are others that size by J. Wood. I used to have a regular size cabinet of the same pose. They are albumen photos and tough in larger sizes.

Thank you for the knowledge, gentlemen. I had thought an Imperial was only the specific size a bit smaller than this. Love coming across new old cards I didn’t know about before, there’s always more to hunt even if I don’t know it’s out there

Cabinets are intoxicating. I got way into them and now I am slowly extricating myself. I consigned a nice lot to REA for the next Encore auction and have others I plan to move.