How many copies of T206 exist today?

[chalupacollects]

Originally Posted by G1911

The easy answer is way, way more than 500, but we don't know. There were likely millions of a T206 common printed.

We have some data points on T cards.

For example, from Fullgraff's records and court records for T225-1 have found at least 21,000,000 cards printed in multiple print runs of as many as 5 million cards in a single day, from August of 1909 to February of 1910 of its 25 subjects. 840,000 printed of each subject, assuming the print runs I have accounted for were 100% of the print runs. This set is not particularly rare today, but nor is it one of the common T sets (t206, T206, T59, T29, etc.). There are several T206 Batch's today for every T225-1 Driscoll's. The survival rate is far below 1%.

T206 figures are not known; and the estimates that assume they were in every Piedmont and Sweet Cap pack for the entire duration the set existed is not a good guesstimate. We could probably extrapolate from sets that are known and relative scarcities to ballpark it as a rough starting point.

Given that the American Tobacco Company owned about 200 manufacturers of cigarettes by 1910 including A&G and OJ and had revenues of $316 million, if there was a card in every pack and each pack was $0.10 that would be 3.16 billion cards produced. So, the big question is how many baseball cards were produced and how many survived?

Note: by 1911 ATC was broken up by the feds as a monopoly with RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris being created out of that breakup.