Posted By:
Frank WakefieldI think that the brown border tobacco cards, the T207s, are a group of cards for which further production was anticipated. In 1911 the US Supreme Court rendered this ruling:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=221&invol=106
And that ruling sets out how the early tobacco companies, Duke, Allen & Ginter, Kinney, Kimball, and Goodwin, (Look at page 156, the paging is in green brackets) how those companies got together and created a 25 million dollar monster, the American Tobacco Company. If you skip some of the lawyer procedural stuff in that link, you'll get to the good stuff.
I think that the trust-busting that took place because of this case put an end to the brown border series of cards. The various companies, Recruit, Cycle, Broadleaf, and the like, weren't united in a common goal after this Supreme Court case. I figure no one surviving company wanted to distribute cards on their own, so that was the end of that era of tobacco cards. Think about it, the early Old Judges are by themselves, Mayos are alone, there are others... then here comes the white border cards from a variety of cigarette companies. Then it all stops. It stops contemporary with this court decision...
Seems to me that more stars would have been in the later cards. By this time they would have been aware of folks searching for stars, so stars would be held back for a subsequent printing. Many of the stars of that day are players we now think of as Hall of Famers.
Frank.