1947 BOND BREAD and its "imposters"....show us your cards ?

abctoo · #1 05-07-2020, 03:46 PM

Due to an excessive amount of blank lines appearing the text of this post, it has been deleted to save space in this thread. This post has been reposted without all of that blank (white) space in the next thread, Post #198.

abctoo · #2 05-07-2020, 04:24 PM

Sorry there was a systems gliche in my last post of less than an hour ago. Below it is corrected without the long white space and other errors. As to the other members' responses about the sources of the pictures, their manufacturers and the processses involved, you are getting closer. It's detailed and I hope to have a response posted very soon.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pcoz

Nice cards guys!

A response about "Babe Ruth" and a note about seeing the reactions of ultra-violet (UV) light on the paperstock of a card to determine its vintage.

BE CAREFUL ABOUT USING UV LIGHT! It is part of normal sunlight but our eyes do not see it. Our bodies though sure can feel the sunburn UV light can cause. We can wear UV light shielding sunglasses, but don't stare directly at the sun. UV light can be dangerous.

Today, UV light sources are readily available and around us in many products. For example, lightbulbs generating more intense UV light than in sunlight are bought by many households to periodically sanitize away the bacteria and viruses that can normally accumulate including the bad "bugs" we do not want around. All of those sanitizing UV bulbs come with cautions not to be around the half to an hour or so while the light is on as the UV light can impact our bodies and to be especially careful not to look directly at the bulb when it is shining as that can damage your eyes. Eyes are not built to see UV wavelengths. All we see are the wavelengths normally visible to us that these bulbs simultaneously generate. It is the reaction to the UV light that is important, even though we cannot see the UV light itself.

UV light bulbs that specifically generate only short-wave or long-wave UV light (without the wavelengths of other colors) can be obtained. Post offices use UV light sealed inside some automated mail processing machines to read the chemicals it has had printed on first class stamps (and some others). These chemicals are invisible to us under normal light but will react to UV light by "glowing" in various colors that the machines can read. Newer US stamps react to certain wavelengths of shortwave UV light, while the Canadian and British stamps react to longwave UV light. You have seen a similar effect if you have ever gone into a "dark" room at some exhibition where UV light was shining on rocks or minerals. They sure glow, don't they.

Why does it seem like I have been rambling with all of the above information? Actually, the information is provided to specifically address the authenticity of the Babe Ruth card shown in the previous post.

First, the card is in a card holder. UV light has to directly shine on the thing you want to react to it or you get no reaction. Even a thin T-shirt usually protects covered skin from sunburn. The plastic in PSA's holder would block the UV from reaching the card so there is no possibility of a reaction occurring. Even a simple card sleeve will block out UV light. Anything between the UV light source and the object will block out the UV light and thus remove the possibility of a reaction occurring.

If grading services would now start to shine UV light through their holders as the test for previously graded cards, that would no test at all. The ability of a paper reaction to UV light has been block by the holder. No reaction can occur even if one possibly could on direct contact with UV light. A preliminary UV light test for the age of paper is that newer paper will react to the UV light while vintage paper will not react. Perhaps, grading services will perform the UV light test in the future by shining the light through the holder and see no reaction. Thus they can claim to have "proved" the paperstock of the card in the unopened holder was vintage as there was no reaction to UV light at all. What would be the value of such a claim when no UV light had actually shined on the card? Keeping this Babe Ruth card in it PSA holder provides a tremendous example of the quality of grading company expertise.

I am no expert on Babe Ruth's autograph. If someone wanted my opinion on whether a Babe Ruth autograph was genuine or not, the first thing I would want to do is see if thing the purported autograph was on was something that Babe Ruth could have actually signed. I've been around long enough to know that vintage Babe Ruth cards are high enough in price and demand that they have been modified, reproduced and faked extensively, perhaps during Babe Ruth's time, but certainly thereafter.

A slight digression: In the 1980s, my son and I set up at a small card show at the Scottish Rites Temple in Oakland where Mickey Mantle had come to sign autographs to help raise funds for that financially troubled local chapter. I had a Topps Mantle rookie that was terribly beat up with damaged corners, numerous creases and a number "7" almost 1 inch high strongly impressed by pencil on the front. Back then, no one would have paid $5 for it. Most grading companies would have certainly graded it "A" for authentic, but I would have considered myself very fortunate if it received a grade of "1" (the lowest condition grade). Before the show, my son said he wanted to have Mickey autograph the card as that would give it some value. When we arrived to setup at the show, I told the person in charge what we wanted and paid the $10 fee for the autograph. I ultimately received the autographed card for my son. (How I did is a long story for another time as the show promoter forgot to have Mantle sign it while he was there.) In the past ten years, my son was offered over $750 for the ungraded card and was smart enough to sell it to confirm he was justified in his actions 25 years earlier. Looking at the extremes, is a Babe Ruth card worth 10 cents or 10 million dollars?

Actually shining a UV light on the Babe Ruth card outside its holder in a room with the normal lights off will show whether the card contains "brighteners" or not. No brighteners, no glow - - the initial sign of vintage paperstock. [That still does not prove the autograph authentic.] If a glow, the card was probably printed on paper made more recently than 1950. That analysis of the UV light results works most of the time and at least gives you a starting point. However, if vintage paper has been kept in direct contact with newer paper containing brighteners, in some instances some of those brighteners can transfer to the vintage paper. The biggest problem is when someone tries to clean a card, especially using some form of soap. Many cleaning products contain "brighteners" just as the boxes of Tide, All and other detergents tell you. Experiencing the difference in uniformity and splotchiness of such "glows" will help determine if that has occurred. At least the UV test is a good starting point to see if the paper was available at the time its autographer was alive.

A further digression: I recently sold a lot of graded 8 and 9 cards of rookies from the middle 1980's. The ideas highly promoted by various grading companies back then to get people use their services included: first, grading will make a card more valuable, and second, grading provides proof of authenticity. Back then, most grading services charged between $6 and $20 to grade a card (some also required membership). A look today at PSA's price guide on-line for PSA 8 and PSA 9 rookie cards from the middle 1980's shows most of these graded cards retail at prices lower than the cost of originally having them graded. Ungraded, perhaps a few of those rookies would sell today for a couple of dollars.

I am not suggesting the owner of the pictured graded and authenticated card labeled Babe Ruth take the card out of its holder for a UV light test, but until the grading card services are held to task financially (like by a court judgment) on the promises they made about the value of their services and the value that grading adds to a card, little will change.

Copyright 2020 by Michael Fried, Oakland, California, P.O. Box 27521, Oakland, California 94602-0521

JeremyW · #3 05-07-2020, 05:30 PM

He copyrighted it.

rdwyer · #4 05-07-2020, 05:57 PM

Too bad there's no date on it.

tim · #5 05-07-2020, 11:23 PM

Thanks to all for keeping this thread alive! I love these sets too.

From my armchair interweb research, it seems to me that the Bond Bread cards and the Sport Star Subject cards are round-cornered and identical, but I am keeping an open mind.

And just for clarification, the only time the Walker Cooper card gets lumped in with these sets is as part of the oversized "Exhibit" run.

--Tim

tim · #6 05-08-2020, 12:22 AM

From eBay

abctoo · #7 05-10-2020, 06:53 AM

The 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread inserts and Cards and Photos from the era with like and similar pictures.

Part One - Introduction

Since Ted Zanidakis made the original post in the net54baseball.com thread entitled �1947 BOND BREAD and its "imposters"....show us your cards ?� over ten years ago on April 4, 2009, it has highly discussed the 48 card 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert card set and many other cards and team photos with similar or identical pictures, or which are otherwise related. The thread contains pictures of some of these other cards. Many of these sets contain potential first year cards (rookie cards) of the player pictured. After the era these sets were issued, 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert cards and most of the related cards and photos have been lost and are no longer common. Since its inception over a decade ago, the thread has had participation from all over the collecting universe. Even those actively engaged in buying and selling cards have asked questions or otherwise participated. Attribution is important because today. All of the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert cards have a much higher order of magnitude in volue than the original cost of the loaf of bread each came in. So do the �impostor� sets.

Net54baseball.com has other threads that have addressed the Homogenized Bond Bread set of Jackie Robinson cards. One such thread has provided not only pictures of the known cards in the set, but authentic documentation to conclusive establish that what was once was thought to been a set of all Jackie Robinson rookie cards was actually a set of cards issued one card at a time by Homogenized Bond Bread from 1947 through 1949. The first card was issued during the summer of 1947 with the other cards issued at separate times during those three years. Though the cards from 1948 and 1949 are not Robinson rookie cards, they remain quite rare.

By the late 1980s-early 1990s, hunting for rookie cards had become a national passtime, perhaps in the minds of many supplanting baseball itself. You could buy a pack of cards from most any card set issued in the 1980s, grade any rookie card found inside, and if you received a high enough grade the rookie card could be worth $20, $50, $100 or more. Collectors did not consider that the number of card manufacturers had increased 50 fold from the early 1980s to 1990, with the quantities of actual cards printed increasing many times more. Card manufacturers were loading up their new sets with more and more cards of the most unproven rookies to the exclusion of well established players. People were paying big money for rookie cards. Many were promoting putting such graded rookie cards away as investments for various retirement accounts. It rarely mattered if a new rookie card was printed as a �limited� edition of 100 or was a regular issue printed that had been printed in quantities of up to 500,000 or more. Grading suddenly made it valuable. Buyers failed to recognized that the value of graded rookie cards issued in the 1980s of popular players was not based on the number of cards actually graded, but based on the sentiment they had for the player.

By the 1990s, the tremendous increase in the volume of cards made by the ever increasing pool of card manufacturers, put into the market place more cards than could be sold. Retailers like Walgrens and Kresge's had volumes of boxes of cards left over unsold at the end of baseball seasons. Wholesalers like Costo and Price Club did not sell out. People who wanted to cash out of their valuable 1980s graded rookie cards found too many others trying to do the same thing. Hobby dealers buying direct from the manufacturer found on delivery of their orders that others were already discounting the product by up to 50% of what they had paid (sometimes 6 months in advance) to the manufacturer. The price of graded new rookie cards collapsed. The card market crashed.

In 2000, I asked SCG to grade four cards from the Festberg find. The grading label on the first three cards (Ted Williams, Joe Louis and Stan Musial) identify the cards as �1947 Homogenized Bond� cards. The fourth (Jackie Robinson) was returned to me with an indication the size of the card was too narrow. Scans are provided. The Robinson card was a little narrower than the other 3 cards SCG had graded. In fact, the Robinson card was the narrowest of all cards in that 24 card set. All of the cards in that 24 card set had slight variations in dimensions from each other. Duplicate cards of the same player from the Festberg find also vary slightly in dimensions from each other. Those variation in height and width among the cards of the Festberg find helps explain why the cards are toned and less thick than the normal cards in the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert set and the �Sports Star Subjects� set. What these differences mean will be discussed in the posts of the next parts of my discussion.

Among the good things that came from the increase in activity in cards in the 1980s is first, many new collectors entered the hobby. While much of that increasing card activity may have been generated by the profit cards could generate, the increased public awareness led to searches for and the findings of many old and forgotten cards across the country. Supply and demand is a better determinant of the scarcity of vintage cards and than sentiment. Sentiment, though, is still an important factor. You can ask most anyone whether they would like to have a 1952 Topps �rookie� card of Mickey Mantle or one of Sal Yvars. Virtually all would say, �Mickey Mantle.� With the follow-up question, �Do you know who Sal Yvars is?,� the response is invariably, �Who's he?� Try asking the average Joe whether he would want a tobacco card of Ruth or Wagner.

Sentiment was an important factor in the issuance of the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread inserts. The parent company of Homogenized Bond Bread and Tip Top Bread capitalized on the sentiment of aficionados of baseball to attract them to select those bread brands over other ones. The ultimate customer only sees the tip of the iceberg. Most have more knowledge about the bread than about what it took in research, planning, development, printing and insertion of the cards into the bread packages. The source of the pictures used on the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert cards, the reasons why those pictures are the same as pictures in Team Photo Packs and on cards that did not come as inserts in bread packages, the printing of these items, the dating of these sets and more will appear in my posts of the next parts of this discussion. Thank you for reading.

Copyright 2020, by Michael Fried, P.O. Box 27521, Oakland, California 94602-0521

tim · #8 05-13-2020, 11:21 PM

Here's a recently completed ebay auction:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/1947-Bond-B...rdt=true&rt=nc
All 48 cards (round-cornered) plus all four Sport Star Subject boxes. These boxes do not show up very often.
--Tim

#9 05-14-2020, 06:53 AM

I thought the “Homogenized Bread” cards had cropped corners and the “Sport Star Subjects” had square corners? I find this contradictory to previous research and discovery. I believe the offering on eBay are “Bond Bread/Homogenized Bread” cards with Sport Star Subject boxes, from which the accompanying cards never actually came from. That or someone has manually clipped the corners themselves

tim · #10 05-14-2020, 09:14 AM

Every time I have seen the boxes and cards come up at auction together, whether it be the Sport Star Subjects or the movie star Screen Star Subjects, the cards have been round-cornered. However, I have only seen the boxes and cards come up together approximately four times in the past 15 years, so that is not a huge sample size.

One other thing to consider is that these boxes hold 12 cards each. 4 boxes times 12 cards equals 48 cards which is the number of round-cornered cards. It doesn't make sense for the 24 square-bordered cards to have gone into four different boxes -- boxes labeled as Series 1 through 4.
--Tim

#11 05-14-2020, 09:37 AM

I defer to Ted Zanidakis' opening post and the examples he posted. Take a look at the example he shows as an original "Bond Bread/Homogenized Bread" Jackie Robinson and note the subtle differences in the cropping of the corners and the image between a Bond Bread and a "Sports Star Subject". The first example (with white background) is an exemplar posted by Ted. The second is from the ebay lot. The difference is clear and evident. The Sports Star Subjects Jackie has cropped corners which are much more "square" than the Bond Bread exemplar. Also much more of the "Dodgers" can be seen in the Bond Bread card, even when factoring in the off-set/miscut. These are 100% not the same cards from the same set, regardless of whether a third party grading company mistakenly labels them as such.

butchie_t · #12 04-05-2021, 02:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rdwyer

Too bad there's no date on it.

I do not remember the exact date but I know I received mine between 90-92. I was a contractor stationed in Thule Greenland AFB and had subscribed to the monthly card subscriptions.

I still have that exact “set” in the holders that they sent them to me in, along with their identifier.

I’d be happy to post pictures but this thread is somewhat dated. I came here years ago while looking for additional info on them. I finally got off my butt and registered this passed weekend.

Cheers,

Butch

abctoo · #13 04-25-2021, 08:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by butchie_t

I do not remember the exact date but I know I received mine between 90-92. I was a contractor stationed in Thule Greenland AFB and had subscribed to the monthly card subscriptions.

I still have that exact “set” in the holders that they sent them to me in, along with their identifier.

I’d be happy to post pictures but this thread is somewhat dated. I came here years ago while looking for additional info on them. I finally got off my butt and registered this passed weekend.

Cheers,

Butch

Member "butchie_t" sent me a CD-Rom with high resolution scans of the front and back of all 24 Festberg remainders, plus the tag the Baseball Card Society sent with them in December 1989. I'm working on sizing them to post here on net54baseball.

We all - much thanks to our new member.

Mike

UKCardGuy · #14 04-26-2021, 01:06 PM

Thanks for this thread.

I recently picked up a lot of 7 "1947 Bond Bread cards" fairly cheaply. (I also got a couple of 1948 Kelloggs Pep cards with the lot).

Based on this thread, I think only my Sheldon Jones is a true Bond Bread with the others being Sports Star Subjects.

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