T206, or not....let's have a continuing conversation....Ty Cobb Smoking Tobacco card

[FrankWakefield]

If, in front of us on a table, there were about a thousand white border tobacco cards that we know as T206s (no slabs) laying there on the table, face up, and one of them was the Ty Cobb / Ty Cobb card... It would leap out at us in our field of vision. It ALONE would be the only card with the glossy front. A lingering question would be why does only one of these cards have a glossy front?

We flip all of the cards face down (gently, they aren't in slabs). There would be a variety of backs... but only one card that has Ty Cobb King Of The Smoking Tobacco World. And all of the cards but one reference Baseball Subjects or Baseball Series.... all except one card, that sole glossy front card.

And if we asked a wife, a third grader, or most anyone with walking around sense (that would exclude me and most collectors) to find the one card on the table full of cards that is different from the others, I think they'd easily separate out that Ty Cobb / Ty Cobb card from the rest.

In my mind is this story of ATC folks going to Georgia to talk with Ty about lending his name to a new brand, and they had printed a sample of cards to give him. And that's where the cards came from, and how they happened to be found in Georgia.

Let me simplify that table of cards. There's about a dozen cards there, all have a red portrait Cobb on the front, although one has a glossy sheen on the front. And those backs... there's one Ty Cobb King of the Smoking World back, and the others are all Piedmont, Sovereign, Sweet Caporal, Cycle, Polar Bear, El Principe de Gales, and Old Mill. All but one of the backs have Baseball Series or Baseball Subjects.... and the one that doesn't is that Cobb King of the Smoking World card. Which card is different from all the others?