E90-1 Series Mystery solved?

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

I think the corners on E90-1s are round because of the great amount of
wear that the cards suffered.

On that thread with the 1911 photo that depicted cards on the wall, most
of those were tobacco cards, not candy cards. Kids bought candy. Kids
put the cards in their pockets. For those of us who are old enough to
remember collecting as a kid before plastic sheets, we were pretty rough
on our cards. Clothes pins and spokes, rubberbands, in the back pocket
and carried around all day at school, we'd even write on them. These
E90-1s went through hell. Their corners eroded away.

I think that some of the cards were trimmed years ago to get them down
to the size of tobacco cards. And this didn't bother true collectors of
the day. Look back at that Nagy Collection card of Upp. It looked good
enough for Mr. Nagy. And good enough for me today, even if registry guys
would steer clear of it.

Lots of T206s are worn, and have rounded corners. There's a slight skew
to the wear, generally series 460 cards aren't as worn as series 150
cards. Any of them that went from pack to scrapbook page would look good
today. Some cards were handed down to kids, and the cards would wear.
Kids had a longer window to play with series 150 cards than they did
460s... But for E90-1 cards, they almost entirely went into the hands
of kids the moment they were bought. Now who of us today would break an
SGC 60 E90-1 card out of its holder, then give it to a 7 year old to
keep up with for one week????


When I looked at my E90-1s it seemed that I had none of the later cards
that were nice enough to show a square corner. But that's the way the
initial series of E90-1s look, too. So there seemed no point in scanning
them. 4 pages behind my E90-1s in the binder are some WG5 National Game
cards from about 1913... and they have rounded corners from being
die-cut. Die-cut technology was around in 1908. But it was expensive,
more labor intensive, and was not needed for a candy insert card. Until
someone shows some really nice, sharp, round corner E90-1s from the
later issues I'll hold onto the idea that they all started with right
angle corners and kids wore them down.