Piedmont Factory 42s are TOUGH. I was fortunate enough to have been the publisher of Collector magazine, so at the time (the Spring of 2007) I had access to the raw data that Joshua Levine put together, as well as the article written by Shawn Adkins. It was a pretty massive undertaking; more than 20,000 backs had been catalogued at that point, and I know that Joshua continued long after the article was published.
Anyway, at the time, the breakdown of backs by percentage in their database looked like this:
Piedmont Factory 25: 37.25%
Polar Bear: 12.06%
Honest Long Cut: 8.8%
Sovereign: 8.45%
Sweet Cap Factory 42 (red): 7.44%
Hassan Factory 649: 6.84%
Hassan Factory 30: 4.95%
Sweet Cap Factory 25 (black): 4.22%
Sweet Cap Factory 42 (black): 4.15%
Cycle: 2.78%
Piedmont Factory 42: .96%
American Beauty (Green): .77%
American Beauty (Black): .69%
Broadleaf (green): .19%
Hindu: .17%
Broadleaf (black): .14%
Drum: .14%
The things that struck me about this breakdown were the plentiful nature of the Polar Bear and Sovereign backs, especially in comparison with T206, as well as the scarcity of the American Beauty backs.
Anyway, I'm sure that over time some of these numbers have changed a bit; I understand that the population of AB Greens have increased with some finds, and that the population of Cycles may be off because a couple of guys with big collections of them weren't part of this project, but I think with this list you can get an idea of how most of these backs relate to one another in terms of overall scarcity, and can see that the Piedmont 42s are not given the credit they deserve.
-Al
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