Question on the E98 Background Color Variations

[Tim Kindler]

Rob,
I don't know about the PAID stamp ones, but I remember a few years ago when some bum tried to sell a green background card with a fake Old Put Stamp.
Yes, Scott's set is still the most amazing thing on the SGC registry.

[pcoz]

Since we were talking about OP's, here's my blue one. After checking some of the OP's, it seems a few have staining as well, which brings into question whether some were distributed, picked up, stamped and redistributed by the Old Put Cigar Company. Rob, Scott M's set furthers your point about different ways they came to the market, as they are stunning cards and couldn't have been in a candy wrapper. I think I remember him saying he got all of them together in an estate sale. Brian, love the blues!

[caramelcard]

Wow. Great card Pete.

There was only one blue OP until I found one on ebay in horrible shape that Tim has now.

How many blue are there now?


Rob

[Tim Kindler]

Pete,
Sorry. How could I forget about that beauty of a Chance that you have.

Rob, I believe there are 5 in existence that we know of: mine from you, Leon's, Pete's, and two others from a collector who wishes to remain private.(maybe 3from him,can't remember)

On the staining thing, it would be interesting to get Brian's take on the cards in his all commons master set. Brian, you out there?
Tim

[phlflyer1]

Originally Posted by pcoz

Rob, Scott M's set furthers your point about different ways they came to the market, as they are stunning cards and couldn't have been in a candy wrapper. I think I remember him saying he got all of them together in an estate sale. Brian, love the blues!

Hi Pete,

That is a really nice Old Put example! Thanks to you, and others, for your compliments on my E98 set.

I have nowhere near the knowledge on the E98 set that you and other collectors such as Tim and Rob have. The only thing that I can add to the discussion is that my E98s were obtained in the mid 1970s from the sister of the original collector who passed away. They were going to be thrown out before my father and I rescued them from the trash!

The collection "only" had the one complete set of all Green E98s (no doubles) and a single low-mid grade Orange E98 that I had the pleasure of trading or selling to Mike P. several years back.

If you look real closely there is a little bit of staining on one or two of my Green E98s but most of them do not have any staining at all.

I can't say exactly how the original collector obtained the cards, whether it was individually or as a group. I can tell you that they were kept stored in a Piedmont slide shell tobacco box along with other tobacco and candy cards that we found stored inside of other tobacco boxes which were kept inside cigar boxes from the period.

[pcoz]

Scott, thanks for the info, and again, the nicest set in existence! I remembered you mentioning you and your pop being together when you picked them up, but couldn't remember exactly where you did. Great story on where they were being held too.

[shammus]

Guys, I apologize - I'm waaay late on contributing to this thread. I completed my Master Set run of the common cards and the entire group went away to the vault. It just took a while for me to remember to grab them so I could participate in this thread

On the whole e98s are in my top 3-4 favorite sets of all time. The challenges I faced when putting this group together rank up there with any collecting project I've ever undertaken. There's such a wide variety of difficulty with collecting all variations like this. Some player/color combos seemingly pop up all over. Others seem to take years to find. This particular project likely would have to rank up there as my very favorite set-collecting endeavor that I've undertaken yet. In fact, I'd say it's inspired a couple of my current projects as I also am after a commons set-run for both the t204 and the e107 set (haha, yeah right!)

Some of my thoughts based on questions asked in this thread -

Toughest background color -- I think the toughest color I've stumbled across was green. When I was starting to inch my way towards "shouting distance" of completing my set of commons, I looked at which cards I still needed and it seemed that I was short all the toughies in green. My favorite color would be orange. That's the most vibrant color in my opinion and maybe the color I had the best of luck finding examples of...lol.

Toughest cards -- I'm one of those that believes that the HOFers in this set are pretty easy to come by when compared to the commons. With the exception of a few tough player/color combinations of course. But interestingly enough, with this set, the HOFers actually outnumber the commons and it's the commons that generally don't turn up to often. The commons themselves have a wide variety of difficulty to them in finding specific ones. Specific color combinations then, get especially grueling. The toughest commons for me were Tenney (who gives me fits in most sets I collect), Coombs and Vaughn.

McLean in blue and orange -- My blue is a PSA 2 and my orange is an SGC 20. I don't really remember any difficulty with either card, but I do recall orange being kind of tricky for me at the very end of the project. For some reason the final 3 cards I needed were all orange and they were all cards that SHOULD have been amongst the easiest player/color combos to find. Cards like the orange Ford and orange Meyers were making themselves difficult to find for some odd reason. No idea why, but I think the orange Mclean was in that group too.

Misprints/Oddities -- Ahh my favorite part of collecting e98s! You run into a lot of Caramel issues that just flat seem to have no misprints/printing goofs show up EVER! Sets like e95/e96, e102, e103, etc... just never seem to have anything unique show up. e98s are a little different. While the set isn't riddled with errors or anything like that, I have noticed a few goofs --

- oversized handcut cards - Only seen very very few of these and they're my favorite e98 "oddity". I have an oversized orange Coombs and Ford in my collection
- blank backed examples such as Steve Falleti's Bresnahan and a Tinker in my collection
- “old put” overprint on back - several red and blue cards
- several e98s with miscut backs (left to right).
- Orange Walsh with red "ghost" layer that Leon posted earlier. I believe that finding an e98 that is "off" in terms of it's registration is insanely rare. Leon's example involves a printing pass that just happened to be off by a tiny bit.
- “almost B&W" cards - these may have been soaked though. I have a couple though that are void of any color altogether.

I'll get a few scans up in a little bit....

[shammus]

Here's a few scans that I promised. I had such a tough time with Coombs, Tenney and Vaughn that I thought I'd show my "foursome" of each player...heh...

The other scans show a few of the "oddities" I mentioned. The oversized Ford and Coombs that are amongst my favorite cards in my entire collection. Also a couple of the black and white cards. I have no idea of these cards are scrap that simply didn't hit all of their color passes during the original print run or if they were soaked. The cards have extremely crude cuts which seem to support the "scrap" theory where they were perhaps pulled off the print run and then manually cut up later on.



e98coombs-002.jpg

e98tenney-001.jpg

e98vaughn-001.jpg

e98 scrap 001.jpg

e982.jpg

[shammus]

I also wanted to take a second and thank Tim K, Pete C, Rob A and all the others that helping me along in completing this project. I got very lucky at times and just happened to catch people either parting with dupes or otherwise shedding some cards at certain points. Thanks guys, I couldn't have completed this without you all

My future with this set? Well, as you can see, some of my cards fall into the beater catagory.... Ok, ok, I'll tell the truth - MOST of my cards fall into the beater catagory...lol. I've been thinking about doing some upgrading. Now that I have the cards finally pulled out, maybe I can take a look and see what I'm needing