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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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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.
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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 |
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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.
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Congrats, Greg! That is a beautiful classic set.
Thank you for continuing to post your awesome early boxing card research. |
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Nice Dundee. Same pose as one of his strip cards.
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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 |
Very cool. I love press used photos.
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Got these a few weeks ago thanks to GFG, the tougher orientations of each subject. My last pickups for the year. Moran is my favorite, as Benny Kaufman didn't make the classic T sets I love.
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I'm not a boxing collector, but my stepmom gave me some of her old keepsakes, and this cool piece was in there.
https://i.imgur.com/U3zPENol.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KAPWQyYl.jpg |
That's a fun piece!
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Hi all!
Looking for very early professional wrestling items from before pro wrestling became more entertainment than sport. Think Frank Gotch, Farmer Burns, etc. Looking for cabinets, postcards, etc. from the 1800s through early 1900s. jeff |
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Cool posters. Some great names. I’ve seen a few a those guys live and they are great especially Andre the Giant. Wrestling isn’t what it used to be. We really miss having exciting current wrestlers. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk |
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Cool posters. Some great names. I’ve seen a few a those guys live and they are great especially Andre the Giant. Wrestling isn’t what it used to be. We really miss having exciting current wrestlers. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk |
Big Bob Duncum snd Johnny Rodz sound like porn names.
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There's a very fine line between picking your porn name and your wrestling name. |
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I was supposed to be done for the year but I was a naughty boy and saw an advantageous opportunity to pick up a batch of Tolstoi's at a price that nets me 1 I need, will let me send a couple gratis to pals, and then sell the rest to make what I paid back and make my Hatranft free.
Hartranft is the score, as he puts me at 49 out of the 50 possible Tolstoi cards in hand. More importantly, he also puts me at 631/632 of the total possible cards for a true T218 master set; I was fortunate to manage to pick up the absolute toughest combinations which are actually in the Mecca run before the deep stretch of the Tolstoi run while I was building the checklist and figuring out what I was actually chasing. I only need a Jack Goodman Tolstoi back to finish this thing. Anyone want to trade a Jack Goodman for 2 Tolstoi's, in their favor? Send over your wantlists if you are collecting Tolstoi backs, most of the dupes will be for trade/sale/etc. |
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Any idea how rare the 1928 James Braddock / graham double sided exhibit is?
I believe the 1925 champion exhibits Dempsey is pretty scarce as well but maybe probably not quite as much… |
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Picked up Iron Mike auto on commemorative coin -1995Attachment 609769
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Stretching the definition of a recent pick-up, but I bought these months ago and had COMC finally ship them not too long ago and finally got around to sorting everything into my collection. When I see old boxing for .50 to $1, I tend to just buy it even if I don't know much of anything about it, that's a fun price to just accumulate old stuff of champions.
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LOL, nice Ingemar's.
Thanks to about a 5 year span in Sweden and some of it's neighboring countries, and taking Muhammad Ali and modern rainbow variations out of the mix...Ingemar Johansson probably had more different cards produced of him than any other boxer in the hobby. Floyd Patterson might be in 2nd place...just because of his affiliation with Johansson. |
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And an 1889 N269 card from Lorillard's, with the Ballin & Liebler credit that I got this week. Personally, I think Mr. Pendergast's sweet mustache is more impressive than any won/loss record in the boxing ring.
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Yeah, the guys in that era had some serious face furniture. You could do a collection of them. Actually I did...
John C Heenan: https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...enan%20CDV.jpg Paddy Ryan: https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...n_%20Paddy.jpg Joe Goss: https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...oss_%20Joe.jpg George Godfrey: https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...odfrey%201.jpg The Great John L. https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ld%20champ.jpg Richard K. Fox: https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi.../Fox%20CDV.jpg IMHO Goss wins that contest. I don't even know how you eat with a crumb catcher like that over your mouth. |
Now those are some 'staches. It's just not the same these days when our champions don't have extravagant facial hair
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Broke my normal pattern to win these three. I don't care about slabs and bust free anything that isn't in my trade bait box, so I usually don't win anything graded over a 3. The silvers are my favorite set, and I'm building a couple sets of it, one as nice as I can get and one as beater as I can get (which is a ton of fun to do and incredibly cheap).
This set was listed last year, I won the James J. Corbett and since then the others have slowly sold. The final ones were put up at auction instead of BIN's, I put in what I thought of as lowball bids on everything, under the previously sold cards by a fair bit. Erne was $103, Carney $126, Choyinski $271. I thought I might get Erne because the card is obviously short. This set has sequentially serialized PSA slabs (James J. Corbett's is different) and has been the registry set for a long time. I've assumed the cards came from a find of 24 cards (there was no Donovan in this set), presumably from a scrapbook based on some of the backs, but I don't know. Some size variance is normal in T220 silver; I don't fully understand why (because of the large margins on the sheet above and below the cards), but naturally short top/bottom cards tend to be those in the top row, especially Jordan. This Erne, in hand, is very short. Erne is also a top row card (the others are Frayne, Burke, and the James J. Corbett extreme SP rarity) and frequently found short top/bottom, but this is a bit extreme of a variance and it gives me some doubts this collection is unaltered. I figured I'd throw them into my trade bait bin if I won anything, but I might crack them all out for my set now as I am not confident these are unaltered, it is very difficult to examine them properly without being able to directly handle, and I do not believe 2 of them to be accurate grades. I tend to find most cards graded in this set to be 1-2 grades inflated, they are very very generous on this issue and forgiving of corner damage, slight missing paper at corners, and even tiny corner creases. I would call my set mostly EX/EX-MT now, with a couple VG/EX's the graders would call 5-6 and a VG Donovan. The Choyinski here is the closest to an actual 7 if unaltered. They are still very nice condition and would go well in my main set of silvers. |
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Owen Moran here makes for 42 out of the 50 Red Sun cards down. Realistically, I am only going to be able to go for a set of the 46 white boys. T226 probably has one of the more unusual sheet layouts, but I have made no success in deducing how this all worked at a production level.
Narrows my realistic want list down to just Jem Driscoll, Stanley Ketchell, Bert Keyes, and Harry Stone. I would like to eventually pick up a baseball type card just to go with the set. |
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And some more silvers. They will be cracked out shortly, and I knew the condition when I bought them, but the Burke has got to be one of the worst 4's I have seen in awhile from a 'reputable' grader. The top right corner is so dented that is missing a small piece of it. There is a deep creasing indent in all four sides, 1 of which is severe on the back. Probably why I got it for only $29
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This one ran $635, which is a rather high price for a T219 Johnson in Good grade and I was hoping to get for a bit less. The green backs are somewhere in the vicinity of 3-5x tougher than the black backs though, and this puts me at 49/50 on them. I only need Willie Lewis with the Honest Long cut Green back and Jack Sullivan with a Miners Extra back before I am down to only some of the Red Cross cards to go. That's going to take decades to finish this 200 card master set....
Note that the T219 adds in his victory over Jeffries into the fight record. A lot of the cards have slight amendments to the text to shorten them a little bit, but only Jeffries and Johnson have additional information added to their cards from the source T218 write-ups. The Joe Jeannette oddly follows the Hassan 30 no series notation back, not the later corrected print runs even though the T219 is 8+ months later in the timeframe. |
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Added 2 Coburn's to compete for my beater set I'm building alongside a very nice condition set, the PSA noting an imaginary variation and the GAI not noting the silver. The 1.5 seems awfully generous with those huge creases, the PSA 1 has a tear rather than a crease. I think the GAI is the one for my beater set.
It's been awhile since I've had a GAI slab to crack to open. I'm not a grading fan, but it seems to me the best holders ended up losing the grading battles of the 2000's. GAI took the black frame inserts people like with SGC and added the handy feature where the slip wraps around the top, and tells you the card, set and grade on top of the holder as well as the front, so that in a stack you can quickly pull a specific card out. Kind of surprised nobody later copied this idea. Beckett has the cases built like a tank for more protection, and more detailed grading, but has faded from their initial gains and is a smaller player even in modern now. |
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Had to get this one to go with the unique thin copy of the Muldoon I got last month.
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My new favorite boxing card
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That's a beauty. Wish PSA would have treated as such when they picked out the holder for it. |
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https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...orn-expo-more/ |
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Do I want to spend that much on a single boxing card? Yikes! But maybe! I've come close to that before. Is this that boxing card? Probably not! I don't think any of the batch will sell at those prices, but what do I know. I was interested enough to sign up for the early notice on it three years ago and still want it. Who knows which of us will end up with it. I doubt I will, the problem for me is the Johnson only has value to me as a set builder rather than an investment or Jack Johnson piece. It's the last T218/T219/C52 family Johnson I need for the master run. I'm confident David will get a very strong price for it |
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