Net54baseball.com Forums - T218 Tolstoi Thread

I wanted to make a new thread since the old T218 threads are full of well-intended but incorrect information and I don’t want to bump all of that. Hopefully knowledge will keep advancing and I'll want to 86 this one too eventually.

Tolstoi has been said by a few of us in the hobby to be a production run of 50 cards, but nobody has proven them together and has instead just given the checklist (including me). I have my T218 set out to sort in 21 Tolstoi dupes I recently got looking for upgrades, so I am taking the opportunity to prove them all here. The only produced card I do not have is the Jack Goodman, which I am attaching separately. Goodman is not one of the tougher Tolstoi’s and I’ve seen several of them. This is one of my favorite subsets in the hobby, as the brand is named after one of my favorite writers, their is great difficulty in collecting them, and their complicated history of production and the mysteries around it making them a fun rabbit hole to deep dive into.

The Johnson (Green) is the only card produced during series 2 that does not exist with a Tolstoi back. Johnson has bizarre print patterns. Johnson (Green) was added to production late, part way through series 1. I strongly suspect this was done when his rights were secured midway through design and launch of T3-1/T9 and T218-1, when the American Lithographic firm. The set is likely, though not certainly, a Brett production. The rights for most subjects piggybacked off the rights acquired for T225-1, the grey borders that were produced over several months in late 1909 and early 1910, and one of the best documented of T sets or would have been secured in advance of a series’ launch. The deductive evidence is considerable that Johnson (Green) was produced on his own sheet; he could not have been added to the general sheets (probably, there were 2 different sheets of the non-Johnson cards per series) and be found with the backs and back relativity that he is found with today. He was not a replacement of H.J. Handy’s card that was pulled between the Mecca and Hassan print runs. Johnson (Green) was continued into series 2, the only card for which this was done. His back distribution is again weird, and the picture reversed - gloves up = series 1, gloves down = series 2, which means he has two different Hassan, Factory 30, no series notation cards. I suspect, again, that he was not included on general production sheets for at least some of the backs, which is why he does not exist in Tolstoi.

Johnson (Blue) also has odd print patterns and is missing a Hassan back. He is, by far, the most common Tolstoi back. It’s not even close. There is a reason there are several of him for sale at any one time and there is usually 0 other cards of the other 49 subjects on the market at all. Johnson Tolstoi’s sit and sit because everyone building a set gets him early, and collectors of big names don’t pay so much attention to the backs of non-baseball sets. I strongly suspect that there were similar sheet shenanigans to super print him, with extra sheets of Johnson’s run.

According to the ATC ledger, the Tolstoi T218’s began packing and distribution on June 6 of 1910. This notation cannot possibly refer to the T220 cards of the same set name, because that set 1) has back dates of very specific events long after this and 2) we know it’s predecessor silver border Mecca run was being designed and proofed in mid September of 1910. It is impossible that this date refers to T220 Tolstoi’s. This June 6 date is extremely unlikely, and one of several reasons I seriously question the ledger’s statements. We know that Hassan, factory 30, no series notation was the first back produced - this print run of the cards has the Jeanette error with one n, while all the others corrected this mistake and added the second “n”. Tolstoi, lacking the series caption, I suspect, is fairly early in overall series 2 production but this is merely a deduction. The ledger tells us that series 1 of T218 was begun issue by Hassan on May 23, 1910 and May 31, 1910. That gives us a one week gap between series 1 beginning packing with Hassan and series 2 being packed by Tolstoi that issued series 2 after Hassan - not quite 100% impossible but 99.9% not happening. Backs indisputably include events up to May 12, 1910 (Brown), and one can argue from the reading of the Jeffries card that they could not have been written before July 4, 1910. The actual date of issue is probably at least a month after claimed, likely 2 or more. We usually see multiple month lead times between content and issue date, not a few days. T218 and T220-1 are some of the tightest of all T sets in event to issue timeframes.

There are probably 2 sheets worth of subjects; with 24-25 unique cards on a sheet repeated in block printing format. In series 1 some cards were printed upside down against the other subjects; it is not certain yet if this was or was not confined on the series 2 sheets for Tolstoi. I strongly suspect that there, aside from Johnson, there are still 2 levels of scarcity with half the cards actually tougher than the others. We see this often in T cards; 1 sheet run more or less with a certain back creating gaps in scarcity between specific subjects, and sometimes a sheet just isn’t run at all (hence, why, for 1 example, some backs of T42 only have 25 of the 50 subjects even possible).

The Jeffries card, more often than not, is seen with red ink from the card beneath him in a stack of sheets soaking through his back, like the example here, creating a ghost effect. This problem does not happen with other cards in the series with any regularity. The implications are interesting.