Black Swamp Find? Tell me more!

[brianp-beme]

Originally Posted by Schlesinj

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FuY9Lof6Z44

I also found it on Tubi. It is the first episode of the first season of the show Strange Inheritance...what a way to jumpstart a show.

The episode states 800 cards were involved. Is this the total amount that was supposedly sold from the find, or the overall amount of cards in the find? The episode mentions that some of the 20 or so relatives involved decided to keep their portion of the find (at the time of the episode, which was 2015). And I remember hearing conjecture that there was even more that was not put up for sale, which a previous poster has alluded to.

Brian

[brianp-beme]

What Black Swamp E98 cards should look like (as if they got fished out of a Black Swamp instead of being plucked from a Bank Vault).

Brian

[ullmandds]

honestly after reading all the comments some questions have been raised in my head.

-was the owner of this find a distributor for a region or something to have so many of these???? And the majority red? Where are the rest of the colors????

-maybe he had a relationship with the printer? was he the printer??

[BobC]

Originally Posted by ullmandds

honestly after reading all the comments some questions have been raised in my head.

-was the owner of this find a distributor for a region or something to have so many of these???? And the majority red? Where are the rest of the colors????

-maybe he had a relationship with the printer? was he the printer??

My understanding is no, he was just the owner of a small meat market store and that the cards were supposed to be handed/given out with something being sold, like candy maybe, or some other item as a type of promotion for the store. The E-98 cards are known as an anonymous set as no one today is 100% certain as to exactly who produced them, or what product or item they were tied to and supposed to be given out with. I just said cany earlier as the set is designated as an "E" set, supposedly linked to a candy issue. There are some of these cards with the extremely rare "Old Put 5 ct. Cigar" stamps on back, but those are not necessarily the main thing these cards were created for, and likely thought to have been used by someone to promote their own product or a different product by stamping the backs of these E98 cards they somehow got a hold of. Here's a story from the Old Cardboard Newsletter about the find from Issue #99, July 2012, Item #4.

https://www.oldcardboard.com/eNews/2.../eNews99.htm#4

[Belfast1933]

Net54 never disappoints…. The background and links are amazing, thx all.

Now I just have to decide if I want to keep my Bres since it gives me a cool story to tell my “man cave” guests when they tour my card space.

It’s not a super valuable card anyway - but it’s oh so pretty!

Thx again (and thx for flipping my Cooperstown photo right side up, Jolly!)

Jeff (OP) - Belfast 1933

PS, I started another thread recently about possibly starting a “Vintage Baseball Collector” podcast soon… this would be a fun topic to cover! Anyone want to volunteer to join as subject matter experts for that episode?

I may try and get this up and going on the next month, maybe sooner

[Casey2296]

Originally Posted by BobC

My understanding is no, he was just the owner of a small meat market store and that the cards were supposed to be handed/given out with something being sold, like candy maybe, or some other item as a type of promotion for the store. The E-98 cards are known as an anonymous set as no one today is 100% certain as to exactly who produced them, or what product or item they were tied to and supposed to be given out with. I just said cany earlier as the set is designated as an "E" set, supposedly linked to a candy issue. There are some of these cards with the extremely rare "Old Put 5 ct. Cigar" stamps on back, but those are not necessarily the main thing these cards were created for, and likely thought to have been used by someone to promote their own product or a different product by stamping the backs of these E98 cards they somehow got a hold of. Here's a story from the Old Cardboard Newsletter about the find from Issue #99, July 2012, Item #4.

https://www.oldcardboard.com/eNews/2.../eNews99.htm#4

-
Definitely and E-card set, agree the "Old Puts" were an individual store stamping at some point.
-

[G1911]

Originally Posted by ullmandds

honestly after reading all the comments some questions have been raised in my head.

-was the owner of this find a distributor for a region or something to have so many of these???? And the majority red? Where are the rest of the colors????

-maybe he had a relationship with the printer? was he the printer??

Old cards were generally printed and distributed in quantity with product sales. If the intent was to hand out with purchases at a store, which appears to be the case, it makes sense that there are several hundred or more. The surviving population known in the hobby today is a tiny minority of the original production. Color distribution in E98 is a mystery but that there are a lot of cards sent to a store isn’t weird or means they have some special relationship with the producer or made them themselves or is a huge distributor.

[ullmandds]

Originally Posted by G1911

Old cards were generally printed and distributed in quantity with product sales. If the intent was to hand out with purchases at a store, which appears to be the case, it makes sense that there are several hundred or more. The surviving population known in the hobby today is a tiny minority of the original production. Color distribution in E98 is a mystery but that there are a lot of cards sent to a store isn’t weird or means they have some special relationship with the producer or made them themselves or is a huge distributor.

we're talking potentially well over 1000 e98 cards...mostly red. This seems like an awfully large # of cards to me?

[Lorewalker]

Originally Posted by ullmandds

we're talking potentially well over 1000 e98 cards...mostly red. This seems like an awfully large # of cards to me?

LOL Yes!!! If there were more than 1400 cards in this find that is quite a lot for a small local meat market. We are not talking about a Walmart or Target in large heavily populated city but a specialized business is a small community. If he had 50 on hand that would be a large number left over.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by ullmandds

we're talking potentially well over 1000 e98 cards...mostly red. This seems like an awfully large # of cards to me?

My gut tells me there were closer to 1500 cards but I have no exact number. I met most of the family, at the National, when they were being sold. I think I saved about 20 seats for them at the Net54baseball dinner that year, but only a few came to it. Very nice folks, as I recall.
.

[BobC]

The stories always refer to about 700 or so cards that were found. Of the stacks of cards that were still wrapped, there were usually about 20-25 cards in each stack for each player that were found. If there are 30 players in the set, 30 X 20-25 cards of each player equals about the same 700 or so cards that all the stories say was found. Where are you guys getting this 1,000 to 1,500 number from?

And as for the cards being found in the Black Swamp find primarily having red backgrounds, that also makes sense as whoever made them probably printed all the cards with red backgrounds at the same time, and then switched the ink to do the green backgrounds all at once, and so on. So when they bundled up a bunch of cards to send to someone to distribute, they probably created stacks of about 20-25 cards per player, all from the same red background batch. And I'll bet they did the same thing when sending out these cards to others after switching background colors. It is likely that getting different color backgrounds on these cards was dependent on where they were distributed then. Back then, whoever was making these cards probably couldn't have cared less about making sure that people had access to all the different background colors they ended up using.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by ullmandds

we're talking potentially well over 1000 e98 cards...mostly red. This seems like an awfully large # of cards to me?

As I said, it’s context. If it’s a promotional tool for a store, handing out cards with purchases, 1,000 cards isn’t a weird amount that is going to last all that long. Let’s say they hand them out for 3 months only even. That’s 11 cards a day. 1,000 cards is nothing in 1910. The tobacco sets had print runs into the tens of millions according to Fullgraff’s notes, and those aren’t even the biggest sets.

It is a lot of cards in the context of today, where the vast majority of copies haven’t survived. It’s not a lot for a store to have in ~1910, which appears to be the origin. We should not mistake surviving quantities today with quantities then.

[ullmandds]

i think some of y'all are making assumptions that cannot be substantiated.