Articles on Old Judges (+N321, N284), 1955-1962, 1970

[trdcrdkid]

Back in January, I posted the first nine pages of the February 1, 1955 Card Collectors' Bulletin (#94), with a front-page article on N172 Old Judge cards by Walter E. Corson, a major early card collector who wrote a lot for hobby publications in the 1940s and 1950s, and eventually sold his collection to Frank Nagy. (That post is here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=216962) The first scan below is of that 1955 Old Judge article by Corson, in which he says he is compiling a checklist of the set, followed by page 5 of the same issue, where editor Charles Bray notes his discovery of the spotted-tie subset of Old Judges. A couple of years later, Corson was operated on for cancer and started selling his collection, which I assume is what derailed his checklist project.

Next is a long article on Old Judges by Buck Barker and Preston Orem, from the August 1, 1958 Card Collectors' Bulletin (#115). The original ditto is pretty faded, especially on the first page, so I improved the contrast of the scan to make it more readable. Among much else of interest, they announce their discovery of the 1890 Players' League OJs (plus Dailey of Oakland, a California League card), note all the new poses that were being discovered, and mention an earlier article on Old Judges from the June 1954 Card Collectors' Bulletin, which I unfortunately don't have. (If anybody out there has that issue, please let me know.) Editor Bray adds a note at the end about seeing Connie Mack look through an album of Old Judges in 1944.

Next is "Further Notes on the Goodwin no. 172 Baseball Cards" by Orem, from the June 1, 1959 CCB (#120). He summarizes some of what he and Barker said in the earlier article, then goes on to write about some of the players and events of the 1887-1890 seasons.

Then, the yellow pages are a further Old Judge article by Barker from the December 1962 CCB (#141), with more about the different subsets and the recently discovered 1890 cards. He promises more information in the next issue of CCB, but his part 2 didn't appear until the April 1963 issue (#143), which I unfortunately don't have. If anybody out there does, let me know.

Finally, I've added short articles from that era on two other 19th-century sets: Orem on N321 California League cards, from the September 1957 Sport Hobbyist, and J. R. Burdick on N284 Buchner Gold Coins from the April 1, 1962 CCB (#137), less than a year before he died. I've also added a short article on Old Judges that Mel Bailey wrote for the April 1970 Trader Speaks, after Corson, Barker, and Orem (with the help of many others) had done the hard work of figuring out what was in the set.

[kkkkandp]

David:

Thanks for posting these.

Interesting to see the very beginnings of the assembly of information we take for granted today.

I especially liked Corson's note about the now-coveted Spotted Tie subset wherein he refers to the players "...dressed in regular baseball shirts of the period and all have a rather ragged looking necktie..." Classic!

Kevin

[trdcrdkid]

In re-reading this post while researching Preston Orem, I realized that I did not post Orem's article on Old Judges from the June 1, 1959 Card Collector's Bulletin (#120), even though I said I was going to do it in the text of the post. So, just for the record, here is that article.