Quote:
Originally Posted by 53toppscollector
* Honest Long Cut was the third most prevalent back, with 174 fronts, coming in behind Polar Bear (191) and Piedmont (192). If you remove the 12 minor leaguers (printed with only Polar Bear and Hassan 649 backs), you get a list of 22 fronts without the Honest back. They are a pretty interesting sampling. You have the 13 short prints, then Chase Frame Ends, Dougherty White Sock, Graham (Both versions), Hoffman White Base, Wallace No Cap 2 Lines, and Wilhelm Suff ed. I would assume, looking at this, that Piedmont, Polar Bear and Honest were meant to be the 3 "flagship" printings of the T205 set. There is a big dropoff from Piedmont, Polar Bear and Honest down to the next most populous backs: Sovereign 119, Sweet Cap Red 117, and Hassan 30 at 112.
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I'm not a T205 guy, my research is focused on boxing and non-sport, but I suspect part of the reason for oddities in T205 is that it was never completed. Most T sets we have today are relics of a completed production, but T205 was abandoned partway through for some reason (almost certainly the court-ordered breakup, but that's an assumption most have made - card releases definitely slow down after Q1 1911). There is substantial evidence that many ATC issues were not really released in series, but in waves with subsets of the subjects available at an exact given moment in the timeline. I suspect T205 is the ultimate example of this, with its intended ~400 (claimed subject counts are often slightly off, but not far off outside of T205). Maybe Honest was intended as a primary issuer, or maybe those sheets happened almost by chance to just get done in time before the project was cut.
Why X brand released Y sets/waves is an area of mystery that I have been trying to find material for in the primary source evidence. Why did Honest release T219, T205 and T227 at the end of card production as the monopoly was broken up, and nothing in 1910? Some sets suggest connections based on the departments (brands were grouped with several constituting a single department - there appears to be no correlation at all between the internal brand groupings and the factories) but there may be no real correlation - sets aren't released by all the brands in a department. It's not even clear to me the ATC made these decisions at all - the group of lithographic companies making the cards effectively operate as the ATC's direct marketing department rather than just being printers. They even name, design and trademark the monopolies brands. It seems to be a crapshoot for a consumer if a brands pack will have a card or not; even fairly common sets today are packed for very short periods of time if the Posey letters are correct, and most brands don't have a sequence of set 3 replacing set 2 which replaced set 1, there seem to be large gaps in time without cards, and then the brand has cards again, oft for a relatively brief period. There's a lot of stuff here not on the surface directly related to the cards that if we can learn will make a whole lot of what we see in the cards finally fit together better.
Thank you again for sharing the dataset publicly to us all.
02-23-2024, 01:01 PM
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