Quote:
Originally Posted by Jobu
This surprises me too. Like the silks, I thought these were made to display or sew together. I also thought what Todd did - odd that there aren't a bunch with ink stains on them.
I have a cabinet photo that shows several B18s sewn together to make a pillow. This doesn't mean they couldn't have been repurposed ink blotters, but I would like to see the source material for the ink blotter claim.
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This is the source material. I also just joined John Thorn's blog site:
"Shoeless Notes - Issue 003
September 11, 2020
Hello and welcome to Issue 003 of Shoeless Notes, the email newsletter for the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library in Greenville, South Carolina.
When we do find out something we never knew before, it’s such an exciting thing! To be able to share it with you, to be able to make that history come alive, it makes the hours and hours of digging through old newspaper clippings and searching through digital archives worth it. On June 11, John Thorn learned something new.
John is the Official Historian of Major League Baseball, and, without hyperbole, he probably knows more about baseball than anyone who has ever lived on this planet. The fact that even John is still learning new things proves my earlier point: it’s impossible for anyone to know everything. But John didn’t just learn something that he didn’t know… he learned something that possibly less than 10 people currently living knew. He learned what the 1914 B18 Blankets were originally intended to be.
Let me back up, because that last sentence probably doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot to most of you, and the rest of this newsletter is going to go a lot better for everyone if we’re all on the same page! Back in the early days of baseball cards, card sets would often times have designations such as B18 or N162. One of the most famous card sets of all time, which features one of the most famous cards of all time, is the T206 set which was produced from 1909 to 1911. If you’ve ever heard anyone mention the Honus Wagner card that has sold for millions of dollars, they’re talking about his T206. There wasn’t a rhyme or reason to the lettering or numbering of those sets, it was just a way to tell them apart.
In 1914, a unique “card” set was introduced, which has become known as the B18 set. But the cards were not made of a paper-like material, as most other cards had been before it, and as most have been since. The B18s were felt squares measuring approximately 5 ¼" on each side with a dark brown border all the way around. They started getting included as part of tobacco packages, most notably in ones with the brand name of Egyptienne Straights Cigarettes.
A common way baseball cards were distributed in the early days was in packs of cigarettes, and often times the cigarette companies would have advertisements on the back of the card. In fact, the reason Honus Wagner’s T206 card is so valuable was due to Wagner’s objection to a cigarette ad being on the back of his card. Wagner demanded that the American Tobacco Company pull his card from circulation, which made them super rare, and since he is an all-time great, a graded example can now fetch 7 figures.
If you’d like to read a more in-depth history of the B18 set, read THIS PIECE by Jeffrey Obermeyer, which he wrote in 2009
The method of delivery for the B18s was nothing new, but the size and material of these “cards” was different than almost anything that had been seen before. They became known as “blankets” over the years, and nobody really seemed to know why. One working theory was that they were just like tiny blankets, themselves. Another theory was that the name was due to the fact that people would collect as many as they could, and either sew them directly together to create a blanket, or stitch them onto other patches of fabric and create quilts.
The B18 set had 90 different baseball players represented, including nine from each of ten different major league teams. Five of the teams were from the National League (Boston, Brooklyn, New York, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis), and five were from the American League (Cleveland, Detroit, New York, St. Louis, and Washington). There were 16 teams in major league baseball at the time, but why the other six were left out of this set will likely forever remain a mystery.
Of the 90 players represented in the B18 set, nine became Hall of Famers: Max Carey, Frank Chance, Ty Cobb, Miller Huggins, Walter Johnson, Rabbit Maranville, Casey Stengel, Bobby Wallace and Zach Wheat. Other notable players featured in the set include Fred Snodgrass, Ray Chapman, Chick Gandil, and our very own Shoeless Joe Jackson.
Joe’s blanket had two different variants, each of which are shown above. One had purple basepaths and yellow bases, and the other had green basepaths and purple bases. The purple basepath version is the rarer of the two, and therefore the more valuable, though both are incredibly sought-after.
The original photograph which inspired the image on Joe’s B18 blanket was taken by George Grantham Bain (likely on March 23, 1914 at Cleveland’s spring-training site in Athens, Georgia)
Which takes us back to John Thorn, who was doing some reading on June 11, and came across an entry on NYHistory.org which very casually told him precisely what he didn’t even know he was looking to learn that day:
A white cotton felt cloth pen wipe, printed with a central image of a baseball player marked "Jackson", surrounded by pennants marked "Cleveland" and "A.L." for American League, with green borders decorated with purple corner blocks resembling bases, with baseball items in each block including a ball, a mitt, crossed bats and a catcher's mask. Part of a collectible series of baseball team felts given as a premium by cigar stores and manufacturers for blotting the ink from a nib pen.
So there we have it! 106 years after their creation, the world knows once again what these “blankets” were originally intended to be: pen wipes. "