T206 - Back Run Production Numbers?
 

Tried to find this online to no avail -

Of the 15 Primary Backs (not including Ty Cobb)

American Beauty
Broad Leaf
Carolina Brights
Cycle
Drum
EPDG
Hindu
Lenox
Old Mill
Piedmont
Polar Bear
Sovereign
Sweet Caporal
Tolstoi
Uzit

I'm trying to find "Production Numbers" from each of the various tobacco companies. I guess ultimately - a listing of the most rare to most common.

Anyone?

There's no way to know how many were produced. Best you can do is add up all the cards in the Pop Reports to get an idea if how many still exist. T206resource.com has a back scarcity ranking that is probably what you're looking for.

2 ledgers have survived relating to production of T cards, but neither contains production numbers for the baseball sets. Some non-baseball card production numbers did survive in the Fullgraff ledger (though they may be incomplete and reflect only printing at one facility). Production runs for T206 are completely unknown; we can only measure them relative to each other.

T206 Resource was the 1st place i looked - ???

Still not seeing it -

hmmmm - was under the tab named "Backs"

No wonder I couldnt find it

Read Scot Reader’s T206 paper/article. It is (in my opinion) the most comprehensive treatise on t206, including lots of info on back scarcity

https://www.oldcardboard.com/t/t206/...al-edition.pdf

Lonnie, I'm smiling... I'm glad to see that someone else uses searching techniques similar to my own. I wonder who hid it in the Backs tab.

And +1 about Scot Reader's material. Scot's work is a great resource.

I think it will be impossible to find production numbers for the cards, but what may be possible is to find records of ATC tobacco sales by brand. If that ever existed, we could theoretically see which is truly rarer, Uzit or Drum, based on the volume of cigarette sales between the two brands.

That being said, I have no idea where to find that information or if it does exist - but it could be a fun project for someone.

Backs by Percentage
 

A nice little table from PSA on backs by percentage -

https://www.psacard.com/articles/art...ifferent-backs

Sorry for the link - I tried to upload the pic with no luck.

+1. A must read for T206 guys and girls.

But none of those excellent sources talk about actual cigarette sales data. I’m wondering if there is some old ATC ledger somewhere that exists that states the sales volume numbers of Drum and Uzit from 1911. Highly doubtful it exists. But that would be quite the research find.

We have some production numbers for some brands, from the journals of the period and the breakup legal cases. Packs produced in a year does not equal cards though; the ledgers and records indicate relatively short pack-issue periods for a particular set of cards and many packs appear to have had no cards even for brands that were among the frequent issuers of the cards.

Most estimates seem off base to me because they are almost all ignoring the non-baseball cards and/or the lack of cards at all for certain periods.