Posted By:
Tim NewcombThanks, Leon, for posting a real vintage card thread. I was getting kinda annoyed by SO many threads having nothing to do with our raison d'etre, as the Bruces put it--especially the ones on boxing et al...
I guess the reason posts like this one draw fewer responses than current events and politics is that all of us (no matter how big a blithering idiot we are 
) think we know enough about those topics to comment, whereas to post anything on this topic you actually need some information not gleaned from USA Today or Fox News.
Like many others, I read Leon's E98 Briggs? question and pondered it briefly, but I didn't have any specific knowledge about it so I left it for others.
But since Leon has helpfully recalled us to our true purpose, I will offer this bit of secondhand knowledge:
In his encyclopedia, Lipset says that many collectors believe E98 was a Briggs set, but he feels that is unlikely because of its lack of similarity to E97 (different style of artwork, only four players in common). Though he stops short of claiming that E98 was a Standard Caramel set, he goes on to demonstrate that the set E98 most clearly resembles is E93.
He also proposes that E97 was probably the earliest of the E93-E98 set to be issued, possibly even in 1909. E93 and E98 were both 1910 issues (which is perhaps one reason to think that they were not actually issued by the same company). E94 he dates confidently at 1911.
It feels good to do even a little bit of card research --
Tim