Personal Pre-War Set and Collector Survey

[BobC]

Originally Posted by kmac32

Collecting prewar for around 30 years and have maybe 300 slabbed prewar cards

Have T205 Cubs front/ reverse collection 149 out of 151 possible cards
T207 Cubs front reverse with all factory's possible
e121-80 and E121-120 Giante/ Yankees collection
Some Koester Bread to match
T210 -1 Jacksonville set missing DeFraites
Elmer Miller items including his 1919 contract
Assortment of press photos of Elmer Miller
s74 Cubs silks with different types

Fun collection in general

Ken, that is an awesome collection, and am especially impressed with your back/front combo portion of it. Those back/front runs are really hard to complete and seem to always include a combination or two (or even more) that are virtually impossible to find, or so darn expensive you could never afford them. Big reason why I never really got involved or interested in collecting back/front combo runs, or card runs of individual players. However, I do have one particular player back/front combo run I've thought about completing. And the fact that you mentioned you collect S74 silks let's me know you may better understand and appreciate this. There are 4 different tobacco brands that the ad-backed S74-1 white version silks were sold with; Old Mill, Turkey Red, Red Sun, and Helmar. And of the 4 brands, only the Turkey Red silk backings came in two different versions. One with a simple border or frame around the printed information/ad on the attached paper backing, and the other without any frame/border, just like the backs on the silks for the other 3 tobacco brands which also had no borders/frames. So there is potentially a total of 5 different backs for any one individual player in the set. I'd love to put together a back run of all 5 different backs for one player in the S74-1 white version set, but am not even sure it is possible. Red Sun backed silks are exceedingly rare. I doubt if there are any players in the S74-1 set that even approach having a double digit number of Red Sun backed silks that still exist, if they even have any that exist at all. But then the Helmar backed silks are even worse. Forget about not having a double digit number of Helmar backed silks for any one player in the set. How about not having a double digit number of Helmar backed silks known to exist............period. And add to that the need to also then find an oddball framed Turkey Red back version which also doesn't appear for every player in the set and......well, you get the idea. It likely is impossible to put such a back run together. Will keep an eye out though. Got to stay positive in collecting, right?