T206, or not....let's have a continuing conversation....Ty Cobb Smoking Tobacco card

[steve B]

Originally Posted by parkerj33

Just had a thought regarding Burdick decision to group things together as t206 vs. t213-1, t215-1 etc... I think we all agree that there are plenty of reasons he could have considered a broader definition of t206 that included those sets, or perhaps narrower that didn't include the cobb/cobb. Perhaps his decisions were not completely arbitrary or completely his own? Maybe amongst he and the other collectors of that time (1920s-1940s: Bray, Conlon, Carter, Wagner, et al) prior to his first ACC publication, they had already effectively decided which cards should be grouped together as the t206 (which i believe based on leon's posting of original documentation was called the #521 white border set).

If there was already a loose consensus of what would be in a white border set (what we call t-206) perhaps he was just following the prevailing thoughts. Maybe the few collectors of the time were already not considering coupons or red cross's as t206.

fyi, it was called #521 but that # was only coincidentally close to the actual size of the set. i think #520 was t205, for example....and that might also have driven his motivation to make have the gold borders come before the white borders in his new numbering scheme.

I have also wondered if there wasn't something Burdick and others knew that hasn't been passed down for some reason. Maybe because they just figured it as too ordinary to write down, or because it was too obscure and finicky to think anyone but them would care.

There's plenty of stuff like that in another hobby of mine, for many things the best resource was written in 1902, and even some of the original records used as a source may be lost. (and that book has errors... ) A few things were "known" in the early 1930's and are being rediscovered.