T206 "350-460" Question

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Scot, Ted, that's great stuff. I'd noticed the difference between 350-460 and plain 460. That September 1909 Sporting Life ad by The American Tobacco Company only mentions 3 brands, Sweet Caporal, Piedmont, and Sovereign. 150 series cards are only on 3 brands, those 3 mentioned in the ads (1 factory each for Piedmont and Sovereign, 3 factories for Sweet Caporal). So it's easy to accept that one of those 3 companies was first in card distribution... and Piedmont makes sense.

But what I'd not contemplated was that the 350-460 designation only appears on Sweet Caporal and Piedmont, indicating that those brands got to 460 first. Still, it seems if those brands were able to put the number 460 on there they could have left 350 off, as the other companies eventually did. Maybe what was happening is that someone at American Lithograph set it up as 350-460 indicating the 3rd enumerated series, and after passage of time someone decided to just put 460 on all of them. After all, they didn't have a 150-350 did they?

These cards weren't printed with the 'season' or 'year' mentality that we have today, they just started printing them, and kept on. Eventually, 'they' decided to quit adding to the white border set and start a new design, the gold border set.