Thread: rarest backs
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Old 08-26-2014, 09:37 PM
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darwinbulldog darwinbulldog is offline
Glenn
Glen.n Sch.ey-d
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: South Florida
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M131 could go in the same category as D355; you can put it on your list if you reject Burdick's decision to catalog it as a set. Otherwise you have 100% of them with the rare back instead of less than 1%.

The difference is in the other issue that has been raised, stamping vs. printing. Let me explain my choice to include stamped backs, or rather, some of them, as I may not have been sufficiently thorough when I first addressed it. This part admittedly is a bit subjective, but I've arrived at what I think is a reasonable method of classification. Others surely will disagree. My thinking is influenced by some of the same criteria that folks in the hobby apply in deciding whether or not something should be considered a baseball card at all. Was it intended for public distribution? Was it used to advertise a particular product?

I don't think old Howe, or Gilliam, or F, or Jeff himself stamped a card as a means of growing his brand. They stamped their cards in the same way that people used to stamp their books, for identification of the owner's personal inventory. If, on the other hand, I were to stamp a card:

"Sal's Sno-Balls
Metairie Rd.
---------------------
One of 50 Pictures
Of Base Ball Players
Of the American
And National Leagues"

or something like that and give out those cards one summer to every customer who purchases a particular product, then I've created a new type of card. I submit that this is true whether I also own the printing press for the cards and the negatives for the photos that were used on them or, alternatively, if I'm just using pre-existing images for my cards or pre-existing cards for my ad.

That's just hypothetical, and I wouldn't place a premium on a card that was created in that way today using strip cards from the 1920s, but if they were created during a window of time in which the original unstamped card was still being actively distributed, then I would classify it as a different back for that set.

What if it was stamped a year later? A decade later? There's no clear right answer to me, but as a rule I would say it's period stamping as long as the players in the set were still active. And I think there are people who can tell if a card was stamped before or after it became heavily worn, so I would defer to their input if there are examples of stamps on prewar cards that might have been added in, say, 1986.
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