[G1911]

Originally Posted by Pat R

I agree that it's hard to put a number on how many T206's were produced but I think it might be a more accurate to compare them with cards from the same timeframe that we can put some kind of production number on.

How do you know the fish cards in the Fullgraff book are T58's?

We do know from the ATC ledger that T206's were packed with T58's one each per pack as follows

Piedmont - began packing 1 fish (T58) and 1 ballplayer 4-18-10 Discontinued pack fish 8-24-10 continue packing 1 ballplayer.

Sovereign and Sweet Caporal share the same dates - began shipping 1 fish and 1 ballplayer 4-23-10 discontinue packing fish 8-29-10 continue packing 1 ballplayer.

Comparing the T206's to the T58's we know for sure that they started packing T206's in July 1909 in some brands and continued packing them in some brands until the summer/fall of 1911.

So the T206's were distributed for 6-7 times longer than the T58's in 5x more brands than the T58's and from what we do know shows that there was 1 t206 packed with every T58 that was distributed. There are also ads that show there were 2 T206's packed in some packs and also in Polar Bears.

Now if the 40 million fish cards are T58's we don't know for sure if that's all that were produced we just know that's what was produced by Brett lithograph at a particular time.

I think we can say they are T58 because there is no other fish series of tobacco cards from the 1909-1912 period, and while this ledger includes N cards very precise dates are given on this page that rule them out. It can really only be T58. Some of the other sets in this page are difficult to identify (“Actresses, Athletes of America, Indian”), but this one is straight-forward.

I think the issue with comparing T206 to unpopular non-sports sets is that our sources for T206 populations (‘I see X more than Y, dealers have more of X than Y, pop reports, etc. are so heavily and clearly biased in favor of baseball subjects that no meaningful guess can be made beyond the most broad of terms in obvious cases (such as “T206 is more common than T220”). There may well be more T59’s and T206’s, it’s just that nobody besides a handful of us cares.

The ledger has some packs getting two cards, and the period ads show this as well. This doesn’t appear to be so for the entire production; if there is any evidence that every T42 was paired with a T206 I’d love to stand corrected. That this is true for both series of t58 in their entirety is a deductive jump. It is a mighty leap away from the evidence to state that there is a Piedmont T206 for every 10 Piedmont cigarettes.

I do not think we can reasonably say it is true that T206 was issued non-stop or almost non-stop during its production run from earliest date to last date, which all estimates seem to take for granted. We do not know this.

I know we disagree on the ATC ledger, but it includes some dates that seem to contradict internal and external evidence. Some series with a single issuer have multiple issue dates given in it, and multiple “stopped packing” dates. Much of it is missing, and it means we don’t know which sets all have these multiple dates and which don’t. The ledger dates are highly questionable, and even if the contradictions between issue dates and card text are ignored, they indicate cards were issued in a stop-start pattern, not sets for many months or even years continuously without break.

Frankly I hope you are correct, sir, about the ledger, and my skepticism is misplaced. That there is some logical way we can arrive at a statement that resolves the contradictions and without having much of the data originally present on start/stop dates and checks out as true. I remain skeptical, but I’m always skeptical. I guess, to extend the theme, this is my general disagreement with much of what is said to be so in the hobby - it tends to rely on a series of stacking deductions and/or conclusions credited to authorities and then referred to and repeated as fact, whereupon further deductions are then stacked on top, too far away from the actual evidence itself to be anything more than an educated guess at best.

The 5X more brands for T206 doesn’t seem a strong argument to me - the brand gap is mostly from very uncommon backs. Half of them have almost 0 impact on our total for T206, whatever that unknown and unlikely to be known figure is. Piedmont, Sweet Caporal and Sovereign of course are not 1/5 of T206 cards. If we want to go by total possible back types, T59 dwarfs T206 and must have had many billions if we use this logic.

I concur entirely that the 40,000,000 may not be representative of that sets entire run. I would think it quite possible it is not the entire production run, that multiple facilities for larger sets may well have been how it was done. We haven’t anything to prove this was done; but the bizarre structure of these firms and their collaboration on even small non-card orders for cigarette makers would suggest it may well be true. It does not appear to be the cards printed at Brett though; it notes in this section that Brett “burned out” (still not sure if this is literal or a comment on inability to meet the massive order in time) on March 30, 1910. The figures are for February 23 to May 16, 1910, according to the text. This seems to be the production at Old Masters Litho. Corporation, not Brett (they are presumably, from Fullgraff’s contract, the court records etc. very closely related or two subsidiaries of the same parent) - I haven’t yet got around to digging into Old Masters yet.

T206 may have had 200,000,000. Or 370,000,000. Or 500,000,000. I think no guess given can be close enough to the evidence to be reasonably accurate in any meaningful way. I would very much like to be wrong; attempting to understand the ‘true scarcity’ has given way to ‘relative scarcity’, and even that is a wildly imprecise thing of which we can still say little with any reasonable degree of practical certainty, to Adam's point.