Posted By:
William HeitmanI'm sitting here looking at my copy of the American Card Catalog published in 1960. Its managing editor was J.R. Burdick and its associate editors were Charles R. Bray, Woody Gelman, Charles C. Barker, Preston D. Orem and Edwin R. Payne. It was billed as "The Standard Guide On All Collected Cards and Their Values." It was, in my view, an attempt to group cards together in order to make some sense out of it all and to aid collectors. That was easy in the case of groups like R319--a set defined in and of itself as 240 cards with the same design. (Even that is interesting since the #106 in that "set" wasn't issued until a year after the other 239) But the simple thing is that there was a time when the makers of cards (not just baseball cards, by the way) didn't make that task very easy. So the ACC people decided to give numbers to cards in the way they collectored them. They grouped them, when a set designation was anything but clear, by styles and eras, sometimes combining the two. They saw some type of patterns based on the way these things had been collected up to 1960 and the catalog number they assigned had only to do with collecting habits--not science. In truth, there is no such thing as a T206. It is a number assigned to a group of cards, probably published all in or about 1910 and all having similar characteristics. The "T" stood for Twentieth as in 20th Century. T213 they saw as distinct from T206 because of its inclusion of Federal Leaguers and they felt quite comfortable designating this as a distinct "group" of cards. We, in this hobby, have chosen to use the numbers given to groups of cards by the American Card Catalog. Nobody at Kinney Tobacco did that for us when their Sweet Carporal cards were issued and no one in 1909, 1910 or 1911 put out a checklist of those cards they were issuing. In the listing for T206, the ACC includes the Ty Cobb back. So that's what it is. It just happens to be one of the backs listed as falling into the group the editors called T206. If it doesn't fall in there, then you can call it whatever you want. But you should know that until the publication of the ACC, there was no such thing as a T206. While it's sometimes difficult to understand why they did things the way they did, we card collectors were thrilled to have a way to group these cards together. You want to tear this apart, be my guest. Come up with a better numbering system. Make the grading services rich when T206 ceases to be and everyone has to have those silly little white bordered cards circa 1910 reslabbed to suit the new numbering system. Why is the Ty Cobb back a T206? Because the creators of the designation T206 threw it in there.