T206 backs, 20 years ago

[trdcrdkid]

Last night I was looking through the December 1995 issue of The Vintage & Classic Baseball Collector, and was interested to see an article called "T206 Back Collecting: A Closer Look", which discusses the various T206 backs in terms of their relative scarcity and market value at the time. I was into T206 back collecting in 1995, even though I didn't have much money, since I was living on a $9-an-hour job in the University of Chicago library, and was also actively collecting trade cards. I had been a type collector since childhood (in 1976 I sent away for one Topps card from each year, 1952 through 1975, for $2.95 plus 25 cents postage), so that once I got back into collecting in the early '90s, the variety of T206 backs were an attraction for me. Some of them were fairly tough to find, then as now, but they didn't cost that much more than Piedmont or Sweet Caporal-backed T206s, so they were within my reach. On my limited budget, I put together a modest but decent collection of T206 backs, and made a display of 18 of them in a plastic sheet, which I posted here a few months ago:



Below is a scan of that article, which accords pretty well with what I remember from that time. You could get EPDG and Tolstoi backs for basically no premium, American Beauty and Cycle for maybe a little bit of a premium, but well within my range. So I would look through the ads in Sports Collectors Digest, keeping an eye out for people selling T206s with tough backs at reasonable prices. I also got some tough backs, as well as many other type cards, from David Festberg's auctions in SCD, which I think ended every Wednesday. I got the Broad Leaf 350 in the above picture in one of those Festberg auctions in 1994 or 1995 for $65, which was a lot of money for me then, one of the only times I spent more than $50 for a card. (I had gotten the Lenox in the early '80s from a neighborhood kid, one of five T206s -- two of them Lenoxes -- that I had in high school.)



That same December 1995 issue of VCBC has a full-page ad from David Bryan selling T205s and T206s, scanned below, which gives a pretty good idea of the prices that were prevalent. Notice he was selling a Lenox T206 in VG condition for $125, and two blank backs for the same price. Among the commons, he had several American Beauties and an EPDG for the same prices as the other cards, including an American Beauty Titus in EX+ condition for $27. (A PSA 3 AB350 Titus sold in Goodwin last year for $1464.89.) Kind of makes me wish I had a time machine, though I'm glad I was able to get what I did back then.