Latest Pickups

[G1911]

And an 1889 N269 card from Lorillard's, with the Ballin & Liebler credit that I got this week. Personally, I think Mr. Pendergast's sweet mustache is more impressive than any won/loss record in the boxing ring.

[Exhibitman]

Yeah, the guys in that era had some serious face furniture. You could do a collection of them. Actually I did...

John C Heenan:



Paddy Ryan:



Joe Goss:



George Godfrey:



The Great John L.



Richard K. Fox:



IMHO Goss wins that contest. I don't even know how you eat with a crumb catcher like that over your mouth.

[G1911]

Now those are some 'staches. It's just not the same these days when our champions don't have extravagant facial hair

[G1911]

Broke my normal pattern to win these three. I don't care about slabs and bust free anything that isn't in my trade bait box, so I usually don't win anything graded over a 3. The silvers are my favorite set, and I'm building a couple sets of it, one as nice as I can get and one as beater as I can get (which is a ton of fun to do and incredibly cheap).

This set was listed last year, I won the James J. Corbett and since then the others have slowly sold. The final ones were put up at auction instead of BIN's, I put in what I thought of as lowball bids on everything, under the previously sold cards by a fair bit. Erne was $103, Carney $126, Choyinski $271. I thought I might get Erne because the card is obviously short.

This set has sequentially serialized PSA slabs (James J. Corbett's is different) and has been the registry set for a long time. I've assumed the cards came from a find of 24 cards (there was no Donovan in this set), presumably from a scrapbook based on some of the backs, but I don't know. Some size variance is normal in T220 silver; I don't fully understand why (because of the large margins on the sheet above and below the cards), but naturally short top/bottom cards tend to be those in the top row, especially Jordan. This Erne, in hand, is very short. Erne is also a top row card (the others are Frayne, Burke, and the James J. Corbett extreme SP rarity) and frequently found short top/bottom, but this is a bit extreme of a variance and it gives me some doubts this collection is unaltered.

I figured I'd throw them into my trade bait bin if I won anything, but I might crack them all out for my set now as I am not confident these are unaltered, it is very difficult to examine them properly without being able to directly handle, and I do not believe 2 of them to be accurate grades. I tend to find most cards graded in this set to be 1-2 grades inflated, they are very very generous on this issue and forgiving of corner damage, slight missing paper at corners, and even tiny corner creases. I would call my set mostly EX/EX-MT now, with a couple VG/EX's the graders would call 5-6 and a VG Donovan. The Choyinski here is the closest to an actual 7 if unaltered. They are still very nice condition and would go well in my main set of silvers.

[G1911]

Owen Moran here makes for 42 out of the 50 Red Sun cards down. Realistically, I am only going to be able to go for a set of the 46 white boys. T226 probably has one of the more unusual sheet layouts, but I have made no success in deducing how this all worked at a production level.

Narrows my realistic want list down to just Jem Driscoll, Stanley Ketchell, Bert Keyes, and Harry Stone. I would like to eventually pick up a baseball type card just to go with the set.

[G1911]

And some more silvers. They will be cracked out shortly, and I knew the condition when I bought them, but the Burke has got to be one of the worst 4's I have seen in awhile from a 'reputable' grader. The top right corner is so dented that is missing a small piece of it. There is a deep creasing indent in all four sides, 1 of which is severe on the back. Probably why I got it for only $29

[G1911]

This one ran $635, which is a rather high price for a T219 Johnson in Good grade and I was hoping to get for a bit less. The green backs are somewhere in the vicinity of 3-5x tougher than the black backs though, and this puts me at 49/50 on them. I only need Willie Lewis with the Honest Long cut Green back and Jack Sullivan with a Miners Extra back before I am down to only some of the Red Cross cards to go. That's going to take decades to finish this 200 card master set....

Note that the T219 adds in his victory over Jeffries into the fight record. A lot of the cards have slight amendments to the text to shorten them a little bit, but only Jeffries and Johnson have additional information added to their cards from the source T218 write-ups. The Joe Jeannette oddly follows the Hassan 30 no series notation back, not the later corrected print runs even though the T219 is 8+ months later in the timeframe.