1916 Indianapolis Brewing Co Set
 

Sure is a nice 1916 Indianapolis Brewing Co Set for sale at Heritage Auctions. Quite a find. Hope whoever buys it splits it up and sells them separately. Too bad Heritage Auctions doesn't list them individually. I had noticed that another Daubert of this set had been recently graded by PSA. Now I know why.

I have mixed feelings about that beauty being broken, although I might feel differently if I got a whole bunch of them :)

A near set that close to completion is beyond unusual, and the chances of it being re-assembled are slim. Of course, the stand-alone Ruth Indy Brewing would be needed at some point, so that greatly increases your outlay. Still, the missing 12 cards are nearly all Hofers or Black Sox, and key cards seem to survive and/or become more accessible as time passes. I'd hang onto it in hopes of completion, at least for a pretty long while.

Indianapolis Brewing Find
 

Hi Everyone,

This was an exceptional find and we considered all options. We knew not everyone would agree but we decided to leave it as a set since they are so rare and there are so many. Of course we had to pull Ruth. It is always fun with new discoveries and the family traces their history back to 1916.

Here are the links:
Babe Ruth

187 Card Near Set

Catalogs are coming soon.

Thank You and Good Luck,

Peter

That is a great, almost complete set. Those with limited budgets (such as me) need not apply. :)

A wonderful set
 

It is truly amazing that a near intact set of these cards is being sold, but maybe it shouldn't be. I have not been able to find out much about how these cards were distributed, but I did post the back of this "dope book" several years ago. The book was published by Felix Mendelsohn (note inset taken from interior page) and included a different photo and card number for Scott than what ultimately was issued in the Indy Brewing set.
http://photos.imageevent.com/imoverh...ctsforfans.jpg

What is still eluding me is whether the cards were available as something other than a complete set, and if so how. About half the Mendelsohn-related 1916 sets required you to do something once a week for 10 weeks, two others required you to perform some tasks to get the full set and the rest looked to be single card at a time projects. It seems that Indy Brewing would have been the easiest of these sets to complete, with just a one-time payment required. Even if the cards were not well promoted, it would appear that those who were interested would have the whole set. So why is this Heritage auction the first time anything close to a set has been offered? Spectacular find nonetheless.

Considering that the group is missing many of the big cards in the set(Ruth, Chapman, Cicotte, Cobb, Crawford, Jackson, Johnson, Lajoie, Mack, Schalk, Sisler and Weaver), given where the high bid is already, it is almost certain that the lot will not be broken up as it is already at or above break value.

there was another near-complete set
 

Too long ago to find in my email - probably 2002 or so - another complete or very-near-complete set of Indy Brewing surfaced on ebay, sold in single cards and small lots. I bought a bunch of them. The distinctive thing about this set was that it had been seriously water-damaged, so that the fronts had large areas of white where the ink layer had been obliterated. You can still find cards from this group occasionally in the hobby. For a while after that, almost all the Indy Brewing circulating were from this group, but eventually more undamaged ones surfaced.

I remember speaking with the seller (back when ebay didn't monitor those conversations so well :() and he said that he had gotten it from the family who had had it since 1916. It was water damaged when it was lent to a neighbor or friend, who then returned it by dropping it off on a doorstep. Then came a thunderstorm...

I wish I had written evidence for all this but unless my emails from that period suddenly reappear, anecdote will have to do. But it does lend credence to the idea that Indy Brewing cards were sold in set form.