Tell me about this Thorpe card and Matty card
 

Over the last couple days, a couple of interesting auctions (to me, at least) ended on eBay. Earlier today, a 1931 Swedish Kanolds Kick-Mint card of Jim Thorpe ended on eBay at $636. I am a Thorpe fan and had never seen the card before. I Googled the card and found nothing. The seller is located in Sweden and has sold a bunch of Cloetta Chocolate cards in recent months. In addition, the seller has sold other Swedish/Finnish cards in recent months with advertising for "Forsbergs," "Alfa" and "Mazetti."

I was at least vaguely familiar with the Cloetta Chocolate cards because of the boxers in the set. But has anyone ever seen a Thorpe Kanolds Kick-Mint card before? I scoured the seller's history and Google and the only thing I could come up with was that he did sell one previous Thorpe "Kick-Mint" card last October. Otherwise, I can't find anything about the set or any previous Thorpe sales. Are all those different companies and/or brands related?

I love obscure and esoteric stuff, but couldn't bring myself to bid at that price.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1931-Swedish...vip=true&rt=nc

Also, anyone ever seen the Matty "card" before that sold for $920 a few days ago? The Matty image on the "card" is, of course, not unique. But $920 for a "card" apparently from a candy box?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ANTIQUE-034-...e&rt=nchttp://

I am far from an expert on Swedish cards, but that one looks a lot like the artificially aged fakes on eBay. I may be wrong, but the wear on the back just raises a lot of red flags to me.

I agree the Swedish card looks suspect but I don't know enough about them to say for sure. The Matty card type was discussed a few days ago. It is a 1910 E-Unc Candy Box card. It has had it's side diamond-shaped tabs trimmed off too.

You may be right. When I did lots of Google searching the last couple days and could turn up nothing about the set other than that particular seller's listing, the thought that it was some kind of fake did run through my mind. If the card would have been less than $100, I may have taken a chance. But when the bidding was already at $400 yesterday, I wasn't going to take that much of a chance on a foreign card I could not find any information about.

The Kickmint is real. There was another one that sold last year for a similar price. The text on the back of it was slightly different, though. I have seen other cards from this set, but they are certainly quite obscure.

The same seller also sold Kick-Mint cards of Paavo Nurmi ($33) and Ville Ritola ($9) on Sunday. I probably spent three or four hours playing around with Google yesterday to see if I could find anything on the set and a Thorpe card in particular. :)

Same seller on all of them? Well that makes it a little more interesting...

Yes.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/m.l.collecti...H_Sold=1&rt=nc