I put some Dempsey cards up on the bay, which I'm not worried about based on the number of watchers they've already gotten, but there's a decent chance this Peter Jackson slips through the cracks and it's quite rare. If you've been looking for one, this is your chance.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175983168165

https://i.ibb.co/WgmyhSr/1900-Ogdens...kson-PSA-1.jpg

Arthur

Back to pickups.

Thanks to the board for this one, a collection of 23 N266's found their way to me this morning. I had 3 cards previously, so now at 20 different pictures with 6 duplicates. At least 3 of the duplicates are of both the different types though. I assume all 25 cards come both ways and I will wind up needing 50 cards, but I'm not 100% sure that they do nor have I tallied up enough to know if one type is tougher than the other type. Hard to tell which is which in scans sometimes.

Great pick-up Greg. When you say "Different Types", do you mean the ones with the more traditional card-stock vs. the thinner stock ones that appear to have come from a Poster or ad slick...or is there some type of other variation in the set?

I apologize for being obtuse, I didn't realize until I read your post this might not be a known thing in the hobby. I then checked Jones, Warshaw, and the online resources and none of them mention it. I can't find the two types mentioned anywhere before so far. I am a novice with the N cards

The cards (I assume all of them, but I haven't catalogued it) come with 2 different copyright captions on the front. It's a rather faint line that is often difficult to make out in pictures, but beneath the "RED" on front is that line. There are 2 very different fonts and styles, one with thicker letters in a boldface type that appears both darker and more readable, or a very faint italicized font. The two cards attached are both the Murphy/Weir pairing. The text is the same phrasing, though the italicized font often looks like "1890" to my eyes it's actually "1893" as well. I don't believe either is meaningfully more difficult than the other, but it seems there were 2 print runs of this set (plus whatever the thinner cut things with the blue subtitles at bottom are - I do not own any of those. Yet :) ). Comparing all my cards, I cannot find any other difference in the printing on front or back separating the two types. Not a super exciting difference, but a definite intentional production difference that will make a master set, I suspect, 50 cards in total.

Thanks for the explanation. Not obtuse at all. I think you under-estimate your own expertise and standing in the hobby.

It seems like the T206 guys have been doing it forever, but it was very rare for boxing guys to worry themselves over "Master" sets and variations.

Boxing Collectors (with exceptions of course), tend to be more mercurial and unfocused in their collecting and cataloging. Myself included. It wasn't until Evan Jones and then much more comprehensively, Adam Warshaw, that anybody was even willing to share their checklists with the rest of the hobby.

Not to blow smoke up your ass, but you're breaking new ground on a regular basis, simply by paying more attention to detail, that most of us have been ignoring for many years.

I'm sure you could come up with an entire book on just the T218 set, and another one on the T220 set.

I find it fascinating, even if I am observing it mostly from the sidelines.

Thank you, really. I don't want to totally hijack this board into a focus on my favored sets or be annoying with all the pedantic details lol


I like the historiography angle. Minor sport collectors have done little of the documentation that exists for other areas of the hobby, even niches that are equally small or smaller (non-sport N cards have a wealth of secondary documentation, for example, although less collectors as 2 cards of equal rarity picturing a boxer and an actress will have the boxer sell for many multiples more with more bidders). I am happy to have a copy of Jones; it's easy to get a lot wrong when you are the first to do something, especially in the period before wide use of the internet and iPhones that make sharing images easy. Adam's book is leaps and bounds better and I still frequently use my copy (I think the 2nd most recent version) when I come across stuff outside my main focus. I can't remember the last time I came across a card from a set that isn't in there somewhere. Pretty much all of the online sources are similar to these two books though lacking some of the more obscure sets, or are littered with clear errors and don't really add to what is contained within Adam's catalog. I hope he continues to put out updated editions as we are unlikely to ever have a better general catalog and guide to the entirety of vintage boxing cards.

I have several notebooks worth of notations from my teen years just trying to catalog the basic sets of N/T/E boxing and recording the details, plus hundreds of pages of digital files, photo archives, records form other collectors, primary source documents, and more notes from more recent years. I have begun compiling them into an academic style book-like work on the E and T sets only, perhaps expanded to include the N series but I know much less there and am reluctant to ever claim authority. What I really want to do is put out a free .pdf book-like work with full citations and including all the information known to me so I can open it all up to peer review and audit, as I have surely made errors and am missing many puzzle pieces of evidence.

It might be too big of an ask of the hobby to read what will probably end up at over a 300 page manuscript before images are added, covering just a handful of sets E75-E80, T9/T218-T229. I finished the draft of the much shorter E section, but am rather dissatisfied with the quality of evidence for the caramel issues - I have been able to produce little in the way of primary source documents that we have produced in abundance in recent years from the pages of the United States Tobacco Journal and other sources and we don't have recent discoveries like the T220 sheet that completely shift our understanding of production, timeframes, process, and how their makers operated and produced these cards. It's at least a lot of fun to take a trip through my old notebooks and get things organized so I can find what I am looking for in less than 3 hours.

I hope you will be able to put it all together one day Greg. It would be another great resource for the hobby.

Don't think to yourself that it ever has to be perfectly free of errors or all-encompassing to put out. You can build on it as the years go on and more information comes out. I would think you have a pretty solid foundation to build on as it is.

With the detailed work you've done, I'd imagine you could put out specialty guides just on individual sets.

I think I will have a work 'finished' in a couple months compiling what can be proven on all the T card sets and their histories. The joy of digital is updates are easy as new things are found every year. Sometimes the hardest part is deciphering what the heck I wrote by pen 15 years ago ;). I hope it will prove useful to someone, it kind of serves no purpose just sitting on my devices.

And to get myself on topic, some new pickups. Thanks to the member that sent these along. I had intially planned to skip the N28/N29/N43's as they are not a primarily boxing set and the high cost of the baseball players while being relatively common cards makes a set hard for me to justify. I'm sticking with a set of the boxers for now, and probably the marksmen. This batch brings me 2 cards shy of the N28/29's, missing Jimmy Carroll and Jack McGee. It is nice to build a set with cards that are readily available again.

Edwards and Dempsey, as T220 subjects, are my favorites. Edwards is depicted with jet black hair and mustache on his T220, but very differently here. The photograph used for this card is on his N174, N332, and is also the parent source for the art on his T220 card. I believe Edwards was the only fighter in the set who was not really an active boxer at the time of issue; he put on exhibitions but doesn't appear to me from the records to have been seriously boxing anymore - he was in his mid 40's. His N43 is near the top of my N card wants now. I have the advertising poster cut and the proper N29, so that leaves the N43 and the N29 album cut (I doubt I want to compete with the baseball guys for a full album).

You just have to take a deep breath and dive in and publish. Then find and fix mistakes and add new stuff. If it was easy and static, there'd be no need to study it. I freely solicit corrections and additions to my work. What I know is a small subset of what I could know. It definitely (and it should) keeps me humble.