Net54baseball.com Forums - Calling all T206 historians

Jim --

There have been some more posts here more recently that help shed some light on this question. In particular, see my recent post "Hobby history: The first T206 checklist, 1941":

http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=239973

And my post "Hobby history: The 1946 American Card Catalog", with additional contributions from board member Jason19th:

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=241174

Basically, the differences you're talking about are differences in what people have counted as a separate "card" in T206. As you note, the 1939 United States Card Collectors Catalog (the first version of the American Card Catalog) listed 521 cards in set #521, Burdick's designation at the time for what we know as T206. A scan of the relevant page is at the top of the first article linked to above, and included below for convenience.

http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...1/IMG_8308.jpg

I don't know exactly which 521 cards Burdick knew about and considered part of the set in 1939, but two years later in 1941 he published a checklist of the set in Card Collector's Bulletin, based on research by Howard Myers and Lionel Carter. That checklist is also in the first article linked to above (though I'm not going to include it here because it's 8 pages long). It includes 522 numbered cards, but it treats the "Magie" error card as just a variant of the "Magee" portrait, so if you count "Magie" separately then the list includes 523 cards. It does not include the Doyle NY Nat'l error card, which was not discovered until the 1980s, nor does it include the Sweeney "no B" card, which was sometimes counted as a separate card until the 1980s, but it includes the other cards and variants known today, as far as I can see. I'm not sure which of the 522 cards in this list Burdick did not include in the 1939 figure.

In the 1946 American Card Catalog, which introduced most of the numbering system we know today (including the T206 designation), Burdick listed 522 cards in T206. This was presumably based on the checklist printed in 1941. The listing is shown in message #3 of the second article/thread linked to above, and I've also included it below for convenience. This copy (now belonging to Jason19th) includes the annotations of the original owner, Walter Corson. At the end of the listing, Corson added in ink, "also 2 errors totaling 524 cards", but at some point he crossed out "2" and "524" in pencil and changed them to "1" and "523". Presumably one of the errors he was referring to was the Magie card, but I don't know what the other one was. Maybe he mistakenly thought one of the other variants was an error that hadn't been included in the Burdick/Myers/Carter checklist, but then he altered his annotation when he realized that it was included in the 522 number.

http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...1/IMG_2432.jpg

After that, the Magie error card gradually became recognized as a distinct card, and thus 523 was the most common number given for the set. In the 1960 American Card Catalog, Burdick and his co-editors still gave a figure of 522 cards, probably at least partly due to inertia. However, in his 1966 booklet on T206, Rich Egan counted "Magie" as a separate card and gave a figure of 523 cards in the intro, though the numbers in his checklist only go up to 522; that checklist uses the same numbering as the 1941 CCB one, which had by then become well-established in the hobby, so Egan listed "Magie" as #347a. That booklet is downloadable here:

http://t206resource.com/Publications.html

Or here is a direct link to the pdf:

http://t206resource.com/Images/Publi...eballCards.pdf

The "Sweeney no B" variant was first recognized as a separate card by Frank Nagy in the T206 checklist he published in The Sport Hobbyist in 1963, which was subsequently reprinted many times in different publications into the 1970s. Since he recognized both "Magie" and "Sweeney no B" as distinct cards, he listed 524 total cards in his checklist, which used a new numbering system that listed all the major leaguers in one alphabetical list, then all the members of each minor league alphabetically, rather than organizing the names by team within each league, as had been done in the 1941 list and its descendants (including Egan's). You can see Nagy's list in this thread, as it was reprinted in the 1978 Sport Americana checklist book:

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=203207

Given how often this checklist was reprinted, Nagy's figure of 524 cards for T206 remained popular through the 1970s and into the 80s, including in the early versions of the Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide (aka the Beckett annual guide) starting in 1979. However, Bill Heitman, in a 1978 article in The Trader Speaks, and subsequently in his influential 1980 pamplet on T206, "The Monster", argued that "Sweeney no B" was just a print variation and not a distinct card, and so he gave a figure of 523 different cards in the set. His view gradually won over the hobby, and it has been a long time since anybody has recognized "Sweeney no B" as a distinct T206. See the following post for Heitman's 1978 and 1979 articles and part of the intro to "The Monster":

http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=219136

As "Sweeney no B" was fading out, the "Doyle NY Nat'l" was made public in 1987, and became universally recognized as a distinct T206 card. It now appears in all significant T206 checklists that I'm aware of, along with "Magie", but without "Sweeney no B". I'm not sure if there have ever been any checklists that included all three of those cards and thus listed 525 cards, but if they were, they haven't become popular or mainstream.

So there you have it. I hope that's helpful.