Collecting in the collections, outside the mainstream

[steve B]

Originally Posted by yanks87

Quick question for the group. As I dig further into the sets that I am chasing, as well as the research that I am doing on the '49 Leaf cards, I am noticing that there are certain elements that are accepted by the "mainstream" collecting world, (price guides, grading houses, etc.), but in many cases, there are deeper stories that fall outside of the accepted or documented variations, that in my opinion make for more compelling collecting stories. So the question is, are there things that are known and established by collectors, but since they are not recognized by the powers that be their potential true value is not recognized?

A couple of quick examples:

T201 - two factory backs, 649 and 30, with the 30's being tougher in spots to find, the Lord/Dougherty being the toughest to find with only 5-6 know on the board

T207 + T205 - Different company backs, and the factories associated with them - anonymous backs T207's with factory 3 and 25

1949 Leaf - There are 3 accepted variations, but the variations run throughout the entire non-short print set, with changes that indicate that there was a second printing of the first run of cards.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of the group to if the non-mainstream variations are worth more, or less if they are just known to the die hards, or if it takes the mainstream accepting them for the variations to be "real".

49 Leaf does indeed have more than 3 different varieties. each color comes at least two ways, and some colors have very obvious differences that are always one of those ways but not the other.
And there are what I call "transitional types, where a card might have for instance variety1 of blue that usually goes with variety 1 of red, but some have blue 1 and red 2.
As far as I know the grading companied recognize none of them.

It's way more complex than I ever expected when I started putting together my visual spreadsheet, especially for such a small set.


Many sets have unrecognized differences, ranging from very obvious like the pink vs red 49 Leaf to very subtle or hard to spot stuff like different angles on the halftones (88 score) or different patterns to the glosscoat (93 upper deck)

In some ways I'd like to see their existence acknowledged by some hobby "authority" but in other ways I'd like them to remain sort of secret. Once that recognition comes, some will become expensive.