What was the salvation of the Prewar card hobby

[akleinb611]

Sorry if I misunderstood your question. My guess is that most surviving T cards were pasted into scrapbooks, with a simple flour and water paste. Scrapbooking used to be much more of a thing than it is today. These have been soaked out of the scrapbooks, with such a simple glue leaving little or no residue.

What's important to understand is that the major T card sets, T201 through T207, were produced in astounding quantities, comparable perhaps to the overproduced Topps baseball sets of the late 1980's. Even to this day, T206 cards in a general sense are not rare, considering the fact that they're over a century old. It's possible less than 1% have survived. That should give you an idea of how great the number of cards was originally. It's pointless to try to get to specifics, because even if you could pinpoint the precise numbers of T cards, Goudeys and PlayBalls originally issued, the survival percentages are pure guesswork. Given the huge numbers originally produced, the difference between a 1% survival rate and a 2% survival rate would be gigantic.