What's the rarest card you own?

[phlflyer1]

Originally Posted by Hankphenom

What an interesting set! So there were ballplayers on both sides of the box, right, two to the box? If one discovery of new ones expands the checklist by half, I guess there could have been many more players in the original issue. I've always wondered how things like this can be so rare. Anybody else have any of these? Perhaps these were test issues, or proofs, otherwise why aren't there more of them around? You'd think more than one kid would have kept the boxes to put other cards or stuff in. Wonder what the candy or gifts consisted of? And what's with the "privilege of opening and examining" on the flap? What's that supposed to mean? Last mystery: how in the world did Scott's two examples get graded so differently by SGC? A clearly hand-cut card gets a "5?" Wow! Overall, these are the coolest things I've seen in a long time.

Hi Hank,

I'll try to keep my reply brief as I don't want to take up much more of the thread discussing this one particular set with all of the other great rarities being posted.

As Aaron mentioned, I wrote about the 1910 All Star Baseball set in Old Cardboard magazine issue #3 (thanks Aaron for posting the link!). There is a lot more detail to be found in that article than what I'm about to post in response. Feel free to PM me if you still have questions after this response or would like to discuss the set further.

Yes, there are two subjects per box (one on each side). Not only that, each of the known boxes consists of one subject from the American League and one from the National League at the same position. Of the known set checklist, there exists a pair of players for each position (1 AL, 1 NL) with two notable exceptions, four subjects listed as "Baserunners" (again split between the leagues), a manager for each league and Cobb and Wagner listed as "Batters".

The notable exceptions missing from the known checklist are a catcher for the AL and a second baseman for the NL. Other than that, I think that the known set of 24 subjects is fairly complete as the composition of one player from each league at a given position seems pretty intentional based upon the box design and the checklist of known subjects.

Why don't more examples exist from this or other candy box issues of the period such as Baseball Bats, J=K or Orange Borders? (BTW, nice Orange Border Wagner George!)

I would say that, for kids of the time, the candy was the main thing that they were interested in. I would imagine that in most cases the boxes were ripped open, the candy was consumed and the boxes discarded. Also, these candy issues were likely distributed in a much smaller region than most of the tobacco products of the era.

As far as why SGC choose to give the Cobb a numerical grade I have no idea. They were all cut from a candy box so really I would have expected it to be graded "Authentic" like almost all of the others were that I submitted from my set.