Just a set of whites. Not really trying for a set of silvers. Even if money was no object, the big two just don't come up for sale often enough to tempt me to try.

Recently picked up these two W529s. I think the O'Dowd is a type 6 and the Britton is a type 7. Can anyone confirm this for me please? I really like these "big head" boxing cards and was thrilled to get these from a Greg Morris auction. I never seem to win his auctions. (I'm too cheap I think ;) )




.

Looks right.

Speaking of rare Mike Donovan's...

Acquired from the BST. I like Mike Donovan stuff since his T220 Silver is my favorite card and he has very few cards of any kind. This is larger than an Imperial Cabinet. 7 9/16's wide and 9 and 15/16's tall, just a hair smaller than an 8x10.

This might be the picture used on Donovan's T220 from wave 2, portraying him in his prime as a boxer instead of as an old man. It's just a hair different, the orientation of the clenched fist, slightly different angle of the foot. The differences may be artistic license or it may have been based on a photograph that is almost the same as this but not quite.

Great shot in that size. I assume that's a large albumen photo attached to the mount. Saw that when it was posted and thought it was a great shot and pretty good deal.

Did you get the large Muldoon that was offered also?

Yeah, it’s a really big albumen photograph glued to the Wood backing just like a normal cabinet or CDV. This isn’t my real area, I have a number of historical cabinets and a few boxers, so this size is new to me. I’m not sure what these are called, it’s significantly bigger than an Imperial Cabinet Card.

I did not get the Muldoon, as he’s posed as a wrestler and I have to draw lines somewhere. That one has a better picture though and I saved a scan. Shame this one has the liquid damage and some fading. I’ve had a Donovan cabinet on my want list for a long time. I hadn’t seen one before, he was retired by the time cabinets became popular so I wasn’t sure if there was one.

Are there other J. Wood ~8x10 boxers?

According to David Rudd's guide it can fall into either the Imperial Cabinet or simply the Mounted Photo category at that size.

He also seems to think most in this size are actually silver/gelatin prints rather then albumen. Albumen's of this size could be made but were a bit too fragile to be practical. They exist but are rare.

Not sure I've seen other J. Woods of this size (or I can't remember), though I'm sure they're out there somewhere. I'd imagine there's at least a few large Sullivans kicking around.

Nice cabinet. Imperial cabinet is often used for anything larger then a regular size cabinet. Also over sized cabinet is another terminology. Yes there are others that size by J. Wood. I used to have a regular size cabinet of the same pose. They are albumen photos and tough in larger sizes.

Thank you for the knowledge, gentlemen. I had thought an Imperial was only the specific size a bit smaller than this. Love coming across new old cards I didn’t know about before, there’s always more to hunt even if I don’t know it’s out there

Cabinets are intoxicating. I got way into them and now I am slowly extricating myself. I consigned a nice lot to REA for the next Encore auction and have others I plan to move.

I spent too long passing on the cabinets; they are awesome but I love building sets and cabinets are mostly the exact opposite of set collecting. Let way too many go before I decided it was okay to get cool stuff that isn't part of a complete set to file into my spreadsheets.

Well, you can build a 'set' for each photographer. My Sarony portraits are a favorite:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...n_%20Paddy.jpghttps://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...abinet%201.jpg
https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ize/img599.jpg

If you are a total glutton for punishment, go for the NY Illustrated News set:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...%20Dempsey.jpg

I only have one with a label like yours. It's a Newsboy. There seem to be a lot of these, but I haven't really looked into the number of different subjects.

There's at least a few hundred subjects in the Newsboy series; but not a ton of different boxing poses. Partial gallery is here, from the non-sport side: http://www.moviecard.com/gallery/oth...acco/n566.html

An excellent breakdown of N566 is here: http://www.newsboys.co.uk

eBay pickup: Frank Gotch Beagles PC

Sweet card!

What are Beagle Post Cards? When were they made? Were they all made at the same time or continuously like Exhibit cards? I have Bob Fitzsimmons, but know nothing about it.

Thanks!

Jerry,

Beagles was a British company that produced or sponsored many many real photo postcards circa 1910. The time span was undoubtably broader, but most examples from boxing or wrestling I've seen have been right there. TPGs grade them and they really are quite stunning! Your Fitz fits into that time frame (see what I did there?). There are some great Jack Johnson issues that several of the board members have in their collections. Im sure folks know more than me.I'm

John

There are four (five if you count Muldoon) boxing subjects in the Newsboy set (Corbett, Sullivan, Jackson, Fitzsimmons) BUT there are a ton of pose and mount variations (many minute), at least a few known uses of the cards as trade cards by other businesses, and some of the poses were issued on mounts of the photo studio (Campbell) that made them.

Both Wills backs. Nice little set, and really cheap.

I paid $765. I'm not sure if I overpaid a bit or not. It is the key card and a tough set that looks gorgeous, so I grabbed it. I think this means I have to build the set now. It's a shame this set is rare, I really love the lithography in this series and it would be nice if they were widely available.

Unclear if it went through eBay authentication or not, PSA didn't veto my deal but it didn't come with a slip, the paper certification, the sealed wrapper, the blue folding box or anything else; it was just the card loose in the box. Another complete waste of time, money and effort from this absurd program. Maybe PSA can't figure out if oversize SGC slabs are real slabs or not.

Great card from a great set. Back in the early 2000's I BIN'd a really clean set (or very close to it) of these on Ebay, and drove up to Albany, NY to pick them up at a card shop.

I think they sat there on Ebay for weeks before I pulled the trigger on them.

Sold them off shortly after. I don't think they are super rare, but I don't think I've had even another single since then.

I love the over-sized tobacco cards and the great litho work on them.

A full set is a very rare find, that is awesome.

These are in the sweet spot of tough, I think. Tough enough that you have to hunt to get them (for example, there are 0 cards form this set on eBay right now at any price) but they are out there and building a set is a realistic goal rather than an exercise in futility like the super rare sets. They look better in hand, the larger size lends to the lithography. These and the N43's are probably the nicest art sets of boxers before the T9's, but like the T9's aren't always available. I'm up to 3 now after buying 2 as type cards (always dangerous, a type buy leads to a set build later...).

So here's a mystery:

I found this in a collection of Victorian trade cards:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ize/img098.jpg

It is clearly cut from something. Blank backed. About the size of a baseball card, too thick for a cigar box label. Under a 100x microscope it is clearly a litho with metallic ink overlaid similar to a T220 silver

Anyone got any ideas?

I'm thinking you might be right about it being from a cigar label. I found this label that's sort of similar.

Not a fan of 'fake' relics with material that really doesn't have anything to do with the subject, but I understand how difficult it is to do a set of subjects like this without them in the era where relics are expected as a necessary requirement for a set. I love the base cards and what Bar, Historic Autographs, etc. are trying to do. We're getting more history cards these days, and that's good. This Pieces of the Past set has cards of Sullivan and Jeffries. Picked up 2 of the Jeffries 1/1's (there are multiple colors that are limited to a single serialized copy making a rainbow almost impossible) for $9.99 each. Can't argue with that! I do the base sets and as many different parallels of the boxers as I can get.

Picked this up today.

$110 and change for the lot, which seemed good to me. The Cartledge Sullivan I counted as a freebie. Johnson has the two small holes and indications of being in one of those old albums that have the paper holding pictures in over all four corners but the image looked nice. The Burns Postcard is a British series with other boxers, I believe. Not really building the Wills set but figure it will be tough to get a Johnson cheaper than this once I eventually get around to it.

Tommy Burns is still underrated in my book. Tiny compared to the heavyweights he fought against, and unlike many of the old champions he was very active about actually defending his crown. He was also the first to really defend his title all over the western world. But he was the loser of the Johnson fight and thus the narrative.

They say that Abe Attell did some bad things, rigging baseball World Series games and boxing fights both. Personally, I think punching his brother on card picture day was a lot meaner :(.

Happy to cross off a C. 1910 American boxing card need; it's getting a lot less common these days to find stuff I need which is sad for my soul and good for my wallet. I really wish these cards didn't portray the fighters as makeup wearing feminine fighters; the rest of the art is pretty good. Monte was a world champion in his own right.

i dunno, I think the likenesses are pretty good

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...l_%20Monte.jpg

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ell%20RPPC.jpg

They are good. They just didn’t wear women’s makeup in real life as Philadelphia Caramel depicted its subjects in several of their sets.

As far as we know...:)

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I found this 11 x 14 Baer rotogravure over the weekend and had to pick it up

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...togravure.jpeg

I've got a few of these type of prints now and they are pretty addictive. Too bad the print form is no longer practiced.

Not sure who issued this one, but it was a good price. It came from England so it might not be American, but I would suspect it is.

Looks like my UK CDV:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...20Slingsby.jpg

And aren't the four symbols in the coat of arms the four kingdoms of the UK?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...own%29.svg.png

Upon some squinting... So it is! I will make some tea to have while I look at it now

From a local show. The red dotted line at top is not consistent with the album and extends further left than the red area of the poster does at all. The black printing mark on left is also not consistent with the album. I think this is one cut from an ad poster, not the album. Old boxing is basically non-existent at shows here so fun to see and get regardless. Edwards had been retired for 4 or 5 years when the card was produced, in a set of mostly active athletes.

Yup, poster cut. Want some more? I have a partial set of them available.

We talked about them a couple months ago, that was a very nice lot you picked up.

And a 'normal' Ginter, also from the show. I have not prioritized the Ginters as they are just a partial set instead of a full one I will build, I can't justify the enjoyment I get from the baseball players relative to their prices to do all 150 champions cards.

Scored this one off the Bay for only ~$30. Normally back paper loss is one of the few conditions things I care about since I actually read the backs, but as the Ginters are all the same checklist I could care less about it for this issue. Nice front with good color + back paper loss is the Ginter bang for buck in my eyes.

Still need Carroll, Dempsey and Smith next I see them crop up at a fair price. Think I will pick up the marksman in the set too as I like that sport most of all, actually, there's just no cards to collect from it.

Sure was. I went at it hard to get the N28 proof of Bauer:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...er%20Proof.jpg

Some silver, and scored another pugilist cut this afternoon.

Thanks to Marslife for this one, who sent it over just because he's awesome. 630 out of 632 possible T218's are in hand now. I have the hardest combinations done, only need Jack Goodman and Hatranft with Tolstoi backs to complete the master set. I am overpaying for those, hint hint folks ;).

Almost time to pick a nice binder or something and get these out of the box they are in and properly displayed without empty slots in the pages

Each time I get to post one seems like it's probably the last time. 23 of the subject panels are now in hand. Choyinski is known extant and owned by someone else, and McAuliffe still unknown to exist (and if it does, likely even worse than this nearly destroyed Ryan as the bottom left area has the most damage of the sheet). This discovery completes the sheet layout, Ryan is the bottom right which necessitates that McAuliffe was originally the bottom left.

I thought this panel likely did not survive into the present day, but apparently it did and it was gotten rid of from the original dealer without hitting either of his sections of auctions. It's owner unfortunately passed away and the panel appeared via a dealer, who was kind enough to let it go to my rebuild of the sheet. I suspect my offer was well over what it would sell at to anyone else, but at this point in the project the buy price is not particularly important. Big thank you to the member who tipped me off so I could reunite it with the sheet.

A 1/1/ and a 1/9 for my modern Sullivan collection. These relics are BS relics, but it's a Sullivan. The 2011 Goodwin is a nice one for me, most of the low numbered parallels effectively disappear forever a year or two after release.

Another amazing pickup with the Tommy Ryan sheet Greg. Glad you found it.

I've noticed that too. I stalled forever trying to complete the run of 2018 Leaf Metal Erroll Spence Jr. cards before I just quit. I'm probably just going to auction off the run I did get and be done with it.

It may be that I never had a chance because of inside sales to Leaf employees who somehow ended up with most of the 1/1 cards:

https://www.sportscardradio.com/bewa...rds-nscc-scam/

Could be BS--I don't know the site--but I haven't seen any of the cards of less than /4 for sale, except at the very beginning, and I do recall seeing the 1/1 for sale at a ridiculous price pre-pandemic then vanishing, so your point is well-taken.

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...e%20orange.jpg

First ever Topps Magic pickup.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...77db8288a6.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...593c9c1029.jpg

Two boxers for the price of one.

That's Mario Galento, the wrestler, shown with Canera. Not Tony Galento, the boxer.

Geez, looks just like Tony. I know Two Ton did some wrestling too.

Im not a Wrestling buff, but, I don’t think it’s Mario Galento. Sorry. It really does look like Two Ton Tony on top! 😬

I think you're right, it is Tony.

That was my impression as well esp. given the write up on the back of the card.

For another impossible rainbow, my 3rd 1/1 of the card/pose. At least this minor outfit, as far as I am aware, hasn't backdoored the parallels like Leaf. There are just so many colors and patterns done in a 1/1 that getting them all is basically not possible.

A tough Kopec, freshly liberated from its slab. There's a corner crease that just doesn't like to appear in photos, inside or outside of the slab. Thank you to the board for this one!

8/10 now that I'm trying. Smith was a heavyweight contender, some seemed to consider him the #1 challenger to Sullivan for a time.

Another one sourced from the board. I will never get tired of Kung Fu Master Gans. Choyinski is the only real portrait in the set.

Both just happened to be incorrectly graded by PSA (I knew when I bought them and love 'em); Choyinski has a pencil mark in the upper right of the red backdrop and Gans is significantly short side to side. Gans routinely is found short side to side (related to sheet placement? Jordan in the top right corner is often found short top to bottom. Not all right side cards are routinely found undersized), I think this one is a natural factory cut.

Went to an antique store today and added a nice original photo of Rocky Graziano. Owner of the store was telling fun stories of his father in law who was the manager of Tami Mauriello. Nice history lessons including Joe Louis and Frank Sinatra.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...2fd4fb00fb.jpg

Back to wrestling. Got first dibs on a huge 80’s-90’s collection yesterday. This piece is possibly my best wrestling find ever.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...b5bef4a1c9.jpg

I put some Dempsey cards up on the bay, which I'm not worried about based on the number of watchers they've already gotten, but there's a decent chance this Peter Jackson slips through the cracks and it's quite rare. If you've been looking for one, this is your chance.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175983168165

https://i.ibb.co/WgmyhSr/1900-Ogdens...kson-PSA-1.jpg

Arthur

Back to pickups.

Thanks to the board for this one, a collection of 23 N266's found their way to me this morning. I had 3 cards previously, so now at 20 different pictures with 6 duplicates. At least 3 of the duplicates are of both the different types though. I assume all 25 cards come both ways and I will wind up needing 50 cards, but I'm not 100% sure that they do nor have I tallied up enough to know if one type is tougher than the other type. Hard to tell which is which in scans sometimes.

Great pick-up Greg. When you say "Different Types", do you mean the ones with the more traditional card-stock vs. the thinner stock ones that appear to have come from a Poster or ad slick...or is there some type of other variation in the set?

I apologize for being obtuse, I didn't realize until I read your post this might not be a known thing in the hobby. I then checked Jones, Warshaw, and the online resources and none of them mention it. I can't find the two types mentioned anywhere before so far. I am a novice with the N cards

The cards (I assume all of them, but I haven't catalogued it) come with 2 different copyright captions on the front. It's a rather faint line that is often difficult to make out in pictures, but beneath the "RED" on front is that line. There are 2 very different fonts and styles, one with thicker letters in a boldface type that appears both darker and more readable, or a very faint italicized font. The two cards attached are both the Murphy/Weir pairing. The text is the same phrasing, though the italicized font often looks like "1890" to my eyes it's actually "1893" as well. I don't believe either is meaningfully more difficult than the other, but it seems there were 2 print runs of this set (plus whatever the thinner cut things with the blue subtitles at bottom are - I do not own any of those. Yet :) ). Comparing all my cards, I cannot find any other difference in the printing on front or back separating the two types. Not a super exciting difference, but a definite intentional production difference that will make a master set, I suspect, 50 cards in total.

Thanks for the explanation. Not obtuse at all. I think you under-estimate your own expertise and standing in the hobby.

It seems like the T206 guys have been doing it forever, but it was very rare for boxing guys to worry themselves over "Master" sets and variations.

Boxing Collectors (with exceptions of course), tend to be more mercurial and unfocused in their collecting and cataloging. Myself included. It wasn't until Evan Jones and then much more comprehensively, Adam Warshaw, that anybody was even willing to share their checklists with the rest of the hobby.

Not to blow smoke up your ass, but you're breaking new ground on a regular basis, simply by paying more attention to detail, that most of us have been ignoring for many years.

I'm sure you could come up with an entire book on just the T218 set, and another one on the T220 set.

I find it fascinating, even if I am observing it mostly from the sidelines.

Thank you, really. I don't want to totally hijack this board into a focus on my favored sets or be annoying with all the pedantic details lol


I like the historiography angle. Minor sport collectors have done little of the documentation that exists for other areas of the hobby, even niches that are equally small or smaller (non-sport N cards have a wealth of secondary documentation, for example, although less collectors as 2 cards of equal rarity picturing a boxer and an actress will have the boxer sell for many multiples more with more bidders). I am happy to have a copy of Jones; it's easy to get a lot wrong when you are the first to do something, especially in the period before wide use of the internet and iPhones that make sharing images easy. Adam's book is leaps and bounds better and I still frequently use my copy (I think the 2nd most recent version) when I come across stuff outside my main focus. I can't remember the last time I came across a card from a set that isn't in there somewhere. Pretty much all of the online sources are similar to these two books though lacking some of the more obscure sets, or are littered with clear errors and don't really add to what is contained within Adam's catalog. I hope he continues to put out updated editions as we are unlikely to ever have a better general catalog and guide to the entirety of vintage boxing cards.

I have several notebooks worth of notations from my teen years just trying to catalog the basic sets of N/T/E boxing and recording the details, plus hundreds of pages of digital files, photo archives, records form other collectors, primary source documents, and more notes from more recent years. I have begun compiling them into an academic style book-like work on the E and T sets only, perhaps expanded to include the N series but I know much less there and am reluctant to ever claim authority. What I really want to do is put out a free .pdf book-like work with full citations and including all the information known to me so I can open it all up to peer review and audit, as I have surely made errors and am missing many puzzle pieces of evidence.

It might be too big of an ask of the hobby to read what will probably end up at over a 300 page manuscript before images are added, covering just a handful of sets E75-E80, T9/T218-T229. I finished the draft of the much shorter E section, but am rather dissatisfied with the quality of evidence for the caramel issues - I have been able to produce little in the way of primary source documents that we have produced in abundance in recent years from the pages of the United States Tobacco Journal and other sources and we don't have recent discoveries like the T220 sheet that completely shift our understanding of production, timeframes, process, and how their makers operated and produced these cards. It's at least a lot of fun to take a trip through my old notebooks and get things organized so I can find what I am looking for in less than 3 hours.

I hope you will be able to put it all together one day Greg. It would be another great resource for the hobby.

Don't think to yourself that it ever has to be perfectly free of errors or all-encompassing to put out. You can build on it as the years go on and more information comes out. I would think you have a pretty solid foundation to build on as it is.

With the detailed work you've done, I'd imagine you could put out specialty guides just on individual sets.

I think I will have a work 'finished' in a couple months compiling what can be proven on all the T card sets and their histories. The joy of digital is updates are easy as new things are found every year. Sometimes the hardest part is deciphering what the heck I wrote by pen 15 years ago ;). I hope it will prove useful to someone, it kind of serves no purpose just sitting on my devices.

And to get myself on topic, some new pickups. Thanks to the member that sent these along. I had intially planned to skip the N28/N29/N43's as they are not a primarily boxing set and the high cost of the baseball players while being relatively common cards makes a set hard for me to justify. I'm sticking with a set of the boxers for now, and probably the marksmen. This batch brings me 2 cards shy of the N28/29's, missing Jimmy Carroll and Jack McGee. It is nice to build a set with cards that are readily available again.

Edwards and Dempsey, as T220 subjects, are my favorites. Edwards is depicted with jet black hair and mustache on his T220, but very differently here. The photograph used for this card is on his N174, N332, and is also the parent source for the art on his T220 card. I believe Edwards was the only fighter in the set who was not really an active boxer at the time of issue; he put on exhibitions but doesn't appear to me from the records to have been seriously boxing anymore - he was in his mid 40's. His N43 is near the top of my N card wants now. I have the advertising poster cut and the proper N29, so that leaves the N43 and the N29 album cut (I doubt I want to compete with the baseball guys for a full album).

You just have to take a deep breath and dive in and publish. Then find and fix mistakes and add new stuff. If it was easy and static, there'd be no need to study it. I freely solicit corrections and additions to my work. What I know is a small subset of what I could know. It definitely (and it should) keeps me humble.

Not to mention the wealth of good your resource will do in the getting rare cards slabbed by PSA department. It would be nice to be able to get Gillis slabbed.

Arthur

Yeah, there's that aspect of it. I hear that SGC will now slab the 1955 AASC premiums based on my research, so get those Marciano's in there. Must be literally a handful of them...

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...0publicity.jpg

Good advice. There will be much missing, but I'm close to exhausted on my resources for the 'known unknowns'.

I like picking up Gillis' on the cheap alongside the others ;). Hopefully PSA will stop mixing up T218 and T219 soon...

Thank you to Jerry for this one. McGee finished my N29 subset a week after I picked up the rest of them. Ginter's that all have the same back with a nice front and some paper loss from album removal on back are the sweet spot for me of looks vs. dollars. Only need a Jimmy Carroll now to finish the mini Ginter boxing run. This has been a fun subset to do on the side this year while waiting for stuff from my wheelhouses to show up. Bumping the N43's up my priority list now.

Congrats, Greg! That is a beautiful classic set.

Thank you for continuing to post your awesome early boxing card research.

Nice Dundee. Same pose as one of his strip cards.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...ed3505f672.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...1e0807551a.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...605e6fb97b.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...8d131c2617.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...20bb83e6c1.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...2a1b5e3850.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...56e02ba1f3.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...1d61ac1899.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...eaa71f7f7d.jpg


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thank you sir!


And, a new Dundee card I got this week to follow the theme. Not as cool as the above photo, and more modern than I usually go, but won on a whim for ~$25, which seemed like a good price for a cool uncut strip. Shame that part of Leonard's head is missing...

Took the Dundee out of the frame. Back has some fun notes on it.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...abf337dca8.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...5d80402d57.jpg