Quote:
Originally Posted by nat
Of all of the players on my list, Kondo may have been the hardest to find. Prestige has a Kondo card up for auction right now (current bid is $44 and the auction ends the day after tomorrow), and in their blurb they say that he’s got only three catalogued cards, all of which are scarce. The card that I’ve got here is uncatalogued, and, in fact, was only the second Kondo card that I’ve ever seen. It’s a very small bromide. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1x2, but I do like the image. Whatever that is in the background makes for a dramatic backdrop.
As for when the card was issued: he’s on the Dragons, so that puts it after 1947. Now, he put in only three full-time seasons, so I’m guessing it was issued during that period. So probably 1948-1950, which is just about exactly when you would expect a bromide like this to be issued.
Regarding uncatalogued cards: I wonder how rare they are. There's certainly some variation. I have an uncatalogued Fumio Fujimura bromide of which I've seen three other copies, so even if it's not in Engel's book, there must be a bunch of them out there. On the other hand, for most of my uncatalogued cards (such as this one) not only have I never seen another copy, I've never seen another card from the set. I'm guessing that these ones don't turn up much.
Only one player left for the hall of fame collection. Stay tuned.
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Great write up about Kondo. I saw that Prestige auction for the Kondo card ended at 61$, not bad (I don't have any card of his....)! The scarcity of his cards really reflects the effect of having almost all the card sets of the 50s and 60s having less than 40 cards each, so anyone lower than superstar level doesn't have many/any. Then of course even with the massive Calbee sets in the 70s they were still stocking it with stars/Giants players so even the gigantic 1472 card 75-76-77 monster set is missing a lot of players who were active in those years....
That is an interesting point about the uncatalogued cards too. I have a few menko that are uncatalogued and while some of them seem rare (like you I haven't seen any other cards from the same set), some seem more common but for whatever reason (not having a full checklist, difficulty in ascertaining which cards belong to the same set, etc) just aren't in the catalogue yet!