New here: collecting postcards/ephemera (all sports) & boxing cards; ID'ing RPPCs

[ericm79]

And to expand on the above, I collect pre-"linen" (ie, pre-1930s) postcards from all sports, which mainly means ballpark and stadium views among lithograph and collotype postcards printed on a press and the anything-goes assortment associated with real photo postcards, from slick ballpark and team views to wonderfully amateurish vernacular pictures taken at the local park or diamond. I also have a small but growing collection of cards, menus, and ephemera from vanished celebrity-athlete restaurants, like Lew Tendler's, James Jeffries's, and Jack Dempsey's establishments.

Among tobacco/gum/candy/periodical cards, I mainly collect Jewish boxers and New England boxers from the 1900s to 1930s, from any and all sets and issues. As a broader/less tribal/more ecumenical offshoot, I'm slowly working to compile the full sets of the T218 Champions and the 1908-09 Ogden's Pugilists & Wrestlers and 1915 Ogden's Boxers sets — drawn partly to the full-color renderings in an age of black-and-white views.

As an RPPC (real photo postcards) collector, I've been enjoying following and participating in a Facebook group devoted to unidentified images and crowd-sourced sleuthing (https://www.facebook.com/groups/rppcmystery/) on user-submitted cards. People mainly post portraits, main-street views, and animal scenes there, but I tend to post baseball, football, and basketball, like this one — which remains unsolved, but which I imagine came from either a prep school or small college in New England or maybe Ohio, NY, or PA.

I'll try to upload some other unsolved baseball RPPCs in short order. It would be awesome to draw on the considerable insight here to try to ID some of these. If there's broader interest in postcards, I can also share some of my favorite non-mystery baseball or sports postcards. Thanks for taking a look!