Definitive Dating of Some Allen & Ginter Cards Including N28 & N29

[autograf]

Fantastic work Joe.....I literally played around YESTERDAY with the PSA Pop report for A&G sets and haven't finished with SGC but there are some oddities in the PSA Pop report.....which is probably an understatement.

Your dates and theirs agree on........
N5,N6,N7,N8,N11,N13,N21,N22,N24,N26,N27,N28

You differ on......
N2 (you 1889, them 1888)
N4 (you 1889, them 1888)
N9 (you 1888, them 1887)
N10 (you 1888, them 1890)
N25 (you 1890, them 1888)
N29 (you 1889, them 1888)
N34 (you 1890, them 1889)

The other sets they have dated.....
1886....N16,N17
1887....N1,N3,N35
1888....N15,N18,N19,N20,N31,N33,N36
1889....N14,N34,N38,N39,N42,N43
1890....N23,N30,N37,N40,N44
1891....N12

Not sure what the source of their data is. I know there are ATC pages on dates of issuance for some of the 20th century tobacco sets but not sure if they exist for the 19th century. I have a dozen or so JPG's of those pages for some nonsports and T206 sets.

The PSA census of graded N1-N44 cards is outlined in the picture below.......

Almost exactly 10-1 small to large A&G cards graded by PSA. Not sure what SGC or the combined look will yield but I'd assume something similar. The oversized format cards are super tough which Mark and you already identified. If you assume that submissions are rational, then the small sized cards are 10x more plentiful. As a collector of all the A&G sets, my totals are about 10x small to large as well (1140/133).

Interestingly, looking at the pop reports, on the small-sized A&G's, 5's and 6's are approximately half of the cards graded. For the larger-sized A&G's that census drops a notch to 4's and 5's. Anyone who's graded some can probably attest to the difficulty of the oversized cards.

[Joe_G.]

Tom, interesting data, thank you for sharing. I would be interested in the ratio of small to large cards for only those sets that had large cards. I also suspect a greater percentage of the large cards have been graded as they are a little more valuable. Your 10:1 ratio may become 5:1 and the actual number if we could combine graded + raw might be more like 7:1.

While Preferred Stock No. 1 certainly had a 20 count pack that the large cards were inserted in I'm not sure if the other brands did. Many of the other brands are only known as 10 count slide & shell (small cards). Can you share the results of your study for just N29/N43, and then combine all the sets that were issued in small and large?

Great stuff.

Also, I give zero credit to dating of any sets to third party graders. They simply follow the price guides. Many of these dates were guesses by our hobby pioneer's (Burdick etc.) during the early days of our hobby. They did a remarkable job cataloguing the sets but often fell short on the distribution dates. The only hope to get 3rd party graders to correct the dates would be to first correct the price guides. I know who to work with on the baseball side but don't know which non-sport guide is considered "The Source".

[autograf]

Your theory on small sets with corresponding big sets was, of course, correct. The number wound up at 3.4 to 1 though on those 10 small sets v. 10 large corresponding sets. You can see below.



The individual sets are interesting though.....there are 8x more N2's graded than N36's which I figured would be lower. On the other hand, there are more N44 World's Decoration large format graded than N30 small format for a ratio of 0.7 to 1; the only one with a sub-1 ratio.

I also did a ranking by total PSA population by issue, so you can see the most popular issues or most graded issues (in all grades total). No surprise but N28 is far and away the winner in that race with N2 a distant second. And then only three other issues with more than 1000 graded for N11, N20 and N29.



Kind of surprised N9 flags aren't a little higher than they were with so many back variants and the Fancy cards and other issues. Also interesting that N11 States were so high and N20 chickens. Guess there are a lot of chicken collectors out there.

[tim_uk]

Hi Joe,

Here's a couple of early newspaper clippings that may help you narrow some dates down (one previously posted that you've seen in another thread).

This first clipping from September 30 1886, seems to be referring to N46 - Cigarette Making Girls (although the clipping states cabinet size), and N48 - Girl Baseball Players.

1886 30 Sept.jpg


The second clipping is earlier, dating from May 22 1882, from the London Standard. The advert is for Our Little Beauties cigarettes and advertises the 'new feature' of having a picture in every packet. I believe this is N57 - Beauties, as this ties in with the text (see the Forbes & Mitchell extract below) that the cards were issued in Great Britain. I did look in World Index 5, page 8, but there are no references to dates on A&G in the World Index, that I can see.

By the reference to 'new feature' in the text, we may be getting close to some of the earliest examples of picture cards in cigarette packets - a whole other topic!

You may also be wondering about the Adelina Patti connection. Adelina Patti, "the Queen of Song" was world renowned as one of the greatest opera singers of all time. She regularly toured America to great popular acclaim, from her base in the UK (she spend many years at Craig-y-nos Castle in Wales). A&G used her in this advert, carefully placed alongside the Covent Garden opera listings, where Patti was singing Il Trovatore and La Favorita. I've added a later card of Adelina Patti from A&G "The World's Beauties" (first series). She appears in a number of cards of this era - perhaps most notably as one of the 25 set of "Leaders' by Kinney, alongside Napoleon, George Washington, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc ….


Standard 1882 closeup.jpg adelina.jpg Standard 1882.jpg N57 - Beauties.jpg

[1880nonsports]

Hoping someone takes on the pursuit of finding more definitive dating information for the earliest cards in our hobby. Someone more alive than dead - a condition that now escapes me.... :-)

[Leon]

Great research as always, Joe. Thank you.

[GregG]

Was doing some research regards this post and came across this.
An interesting method to advertise cigars.
Have you seen one of these?