Tag: printer’s scrap

Group of 80 Hand-cut T206 Polar Bears Surface at Auction

Recently, a group of 80 hand-cut Polar Bear came to market via Weiss Auctions.  To my knowledge, this is the first time these cards have been known to the hobby.  When I first heard of Weiss Auctions, I assumed it was a small auction house, but upon checking out their website it looks like that is not the case at all.  It looks like they mostly deal in antiques, but they have sold some high profile baseball items in the past including a SGC 40 T206 Wagner (which sold for $791k).  I don’t think Weiss Auctions is on the radar of most T206 collectors, but it may be a good site to bookmark just in case they get some more cards in the future.

The cards were sold in two groups, one had 44 cards and the other had 36.  If my count is correct, there are 59 unique poses in the group, with 21 of them having a duplicate.  You’ll notice that all 80 cards feature poses from the 350 Only Series.  There are two Hall of Famers in the group, Joe McGinnity and Jake Beckley.  Unfortunately, neither of them is duplicated.

The quality control on Polar Bears was pretty good, so it’s rare to see a significant print flaw on a card with a Polar Bear back.  Prior to seeing this group, I had never seen or heard of a hand-cut T206 with a Polar Bear back.

When a friend of mine told me about these cards, I couple of questions came to my mind immediately:

  1. Did these cards all come from the same sheet(s)?
  2. I wonder if they can be lined up and put back together like a puzzle?

A friend of mine won the lot of 44 and sent them to me so that I could take a look at them.  I was excited to see if I’d be able to line them up and re-create a partial sheet (or even just connect a few of the cards).

When I received the cards in the mail, I realized pretty quickly that it was not going to be easy.  While all of the cards are clearly hand-cut, only a few of them have a really unique cut.  Ideally they’d all have some wacky cuts that would make it easier to figure out how they fit together.  When I sat down to work on the puzzle, I was hoping to make some cool discoveries about how the sheet may have looked.

I’m sad to say, I didn’t find any cards that I’m 100% sure were situated next to each other on a sheet.  The only possible match is these two Bugs Raymond cards below.  I’m not totally sure they are a match though, as I think the space between the to cards looks a little thin.

I still think these cards came from the same sheets, but unfortunately I was not able to prove it.  My hypothesis is that the cards were cut from a sheet by hand, but whoever cut them did a little extra trimming on some of the cards.  If that happened, it would explain the difficulty I had in trying to piece them back together like puzzle pieces.

I don’t know who won the other lot of 36 cards.  If you won it, please reach out to me and let me know.  There’s still a chance that some of the cards I have fit with some of the cards in the other group.  It would be pretty significant if we could re-created a partial 350 Series Polar Bear sheet.  Even if we’re not able to learn more from this group, it’s still pretty cool that there are now some Polar Bear backed examples of printer’s scrap in the hobby.

T206 Cards From the Same Sheet

This trio of Piedmont 350s from the same sheet was sold recently by Huggins & Scott Auctions.  Seeing them got me thinking about other cards that we know came from the same sheet.  In his fantastic book, Inside T206, Scot Reader surmises that the total number of T206s produced could be over 100 million.  Given this staggering estimate, it makes sense that finding two or more T206s that were printed on a single sheet is no easy task.

One of my favorite things about this set is that it lends itself very well to research.  If you learn something about a certain pose or front/back combo, there is often a logical pattern to be followed, which will lead you to more discoveries.  The same cannot really be said for today’s topic.  Finding T206 sheet mates is very cool, but it usually is the result of random happenstance rather than a larger pattern.  In that same vein, there will be little structure to this article.  I mainly just wanted to post some of the coolest T206 sheet mates.

Most of the times that we’re able to trace multiple T206s back to the same sheet, they will be of the printer’s scrap variety.  The reason for this is pretty simple.  In order to make connections between two or more cards, there has to be something that makes them unique.

Take these Hoblitzell and Oakes Piedmont 350s.  They showed up on eBay one day in a group of offerings from the same seller.  I wasn’t able to find out anything about where they came from, but it doesn’t take much of a logical leap to assume they were cut from the same sheet and kept together all this time.  Their large, hand-cut borders and darker-than-normal colors are a dead giveaway.  I’m not sure there’s anything to be learned from them, but they sure are cool.

These three Blank Backs share a similar cut as well as adhesive residue on all four corners of the backs.  They were clearly kept together in an album or frame for many years.  They made their way to market via SCP auctions, where I was able to buy them and keep them together.

The “Lash’s Bitters” T206s are another example of printer’s scrap that work as puzzle pieces that help us to re-construct a sheet of T206 cards.  I have an article in the works featuring these awesome scraps, so I’ll keep this description short.  The back of these T206s was used as a test sheet for trade cards featuring “Lash’s Bitters”.  The fronts look a little odd as well.  They appear to be missing a layer of red.

T206 collector John Dreker was kind enough to send me scans of these four upside-down and mis-cut Piedmont 150s that he owns.  He found Davis in a group of 40 cards he bought in 2000, then bought Tannehill, Doolin, and Cicotte together in the same group in 2002.

This group of cards has been dubbed the “Test Print Sheet”.  As you can see, the backs have a lot going on.

Much like the Lash’s Bitters sheet above, the back of the sheet that Griffith, Lake, and O’Leary were on was used as a test sheet for a Twin Oaks Tobacco advertisement.

This quartet of Blank Backs are very likely to have originated from the same sheet.

The “Rosetta Stone” of T206

This week I’m excited to team up again with Jamie Blundell to tell the story of quite possibly the coolest T206 ever printed.  Dubbed the “T206 Rosetta Stone” by net54’s resident T206 Freak, Johnny V., this card is truly one-of-a-kind.  Whatever you choose to call it, it’s clearly the most impressive example of T206 Printer’s Scrap in existence.  Its simple front gives no indication of the craziness awaiting you on the reverse.

The front features Southern Leaguer Dom Mullaney of Jacksonville.  The back has so much going on that it’s almost impossible to pick up with the naked eye.  Here is a full list of everything printed on the back of this card:

  • Brown Old Mill back (The rarest of all T206 backs)*
  • Upside Down Miscut Piedmont 350 back showing parts of 4 backs
  • El Principe de Gales back
  • Upside Down El Principe de Gales back
  • Upside Down ghost image of Cy Young (Portrait)
  • Yellow ink pass for Cy Young (Portrait)
  • Yellow ink pass for George Mullin (Throwing)

Below is a really cool graphic made by T206 collector Chris Browne.  He isolated each individual component of the back for easier viewing.

This is one of my favorite T206s in the entire hobby.  It’s crazy to think this card survived all these years, while none of the other cards from the same sheet did so.  Someone must have salvaged the sheet this card was printed on, cut up the cards, and saved them.  My guess is the main reason this particular card survived while others didn’t is the image of Cy Young on the back.  I can imagine most of the other cards being discarded due to being both exceedingly strange and depicting a nondescript Southern Leaguer.  The presence of Cy Young on this card no doubt elevated it to a higher status within the collection it resided in.

Multi-strike backs are rare enough, but the fact this one features a Brown Old Mill back and a Cy Young ghost (not to mention everything else) makes it an unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime card.  Since the T206 Wagner already staked claim to the term “Holy Grail”, I think “Rosetta Stone” is a fitting nickname for this incredible specimen.

Unlike many T206s whose provenance is a mystery, we can trace this card from its current owner all the way back to its original owner.

Timeline:

  • In 1970, this card was purchased by a nostalgia shop called Little Nemo’s in Queens, New York from the original owner’s family.
  • This card, along with around 180 other tobacco cards was purchased from Little Nemo’s by Tom McMorrow, the future owner of East Hampton Auctions on eBay.
  • In 2008, after owning the card for 38 years, East Hampton Auctions listed the card for auction on eBay.  In an effort to promote the listing, he made the video below and posted it on YouTube, where it still resides.  Mr. Mullaney (and friends) was won by the owner of the net54baseball.com forum, Leon Luckey, for a final bid of $9,750.

In addition to the video, Tom gave a little more information about the card’s history in the auction description, which was captured for posterity by the website, t206museum.com:

“This card was one of about 180 purchased in a shoebox from a nostalgia type store on Ascan Avenue in Queens, NY named Little Nemo’s back in the early 1970s. The store had just purchased them from original owner’s family. The collection was fairly typical for what a boy growing up in New York area would have collected back in 1911, weighted towards Hall of Famers (three Cobbs, at least five McGraw, several Matty, quite a few New York Giants in the group) all in Gd to Ex condition with a few lower grade, no reverse stock loss on any, and nothing out of the ordinary but for this one. It looked like a normal kid’s collection of baseball cards, much like the Topps cards I had collected in the 1960s. This card was probably obtained by that child back in 1911 the same way kids obtained their cards for generations, by trading, flipping, or straight out of the pack.”

-T206 Museum July 9, 2008

  • In August 2015, the Leon Luckey collection hit the auction block via Heritage.  On August 13, 2015, with a final hammer price of $19,120, the “Rosetta Stone” found a new home in the collection of Jamie Blundell.

If you’ve been reading this site for awhile, you may remember the article I wrote with Jamie about his incredible T206 Ty Cobb Back Run.  If you missed it, that article can be read by clicking on the link below:

The Greatest T206 Back Run Ever Assembled: Ty Cobb Red Background Portrait

It’s really surprising to me that the market wasn’t stronger for this card when it sold at auction.  In my opinion, it’s much more desirable than any of the other Brown Old Mill Southern Leaguers.  Don’t get me wrong, any Brown Old Mill is an amazing card, and isolating the Brown Old Mill back by itself is arguably more pleasing to the eye.  I just feel the Rosetta Stone has a mystique unlike any other card, save perhaps the Eddie Collins With Bat Proof.

Brown Old Mill Southern Leaguers are incredibly rare.  They are all hand-cut and were not distributed in cigarette packages.  The prevailing theory is the printers used brown ink by mistake, and scrapped the sheets.  The cards were then cut up and saved either by one of the printers themselves, or perhaps by kids from the neighborhood.

A few Brown Old Mill Southern Leaguers have sold publicly in the years since Jamie won the Rosetta Stone.  I was surprised to see a couple of them sold for more than the Rosetta Stone:

Sid Smith SGC A sold for $24,000 in REA Spring 2015 auction

J.R. Helm SGC A sold for $14,400 in REA Spring 2016 auction

Dutch Revelle SGC A sold for $20,400 in REA Fall 2017 auction

I want to thank Jamie for sharing the story of this amazing card, and for providing me with much of the info presented above, which helped me put together the ownership timeline.

*Or the 2nd rarest if you consider the Ty Cobb back to be a T206

Why Don’t T206 Collectors Care About Hand-Cut Cards?

Ever since I started collecting T206s, I’ve always been intrigued by cards that are clearly hand-cut.  Oftentimes such cards also have blank backs or are missing colors, but sometimes they look pretty normal.  This Stovall above is a good example of a card that clearly was cut from a sheet by hand (the bottom border is much wider than any factory-cut cards), but looks just like any other Stovall portrait otherwise.

I’ve always been drawn to these cards and I don’t really understand why collectors don’t seem to care for them.  Though the market has been down recently, collectors still clearly covet Blank Backs and cards that are missing multiple colors passes.  It makes sense that the most unique examples of Printer’s Scrap would be the most valuable.  However, there is a ton of demand for other semi-scarce T206s, so the lack of demand for cards like my Stovall seems odd.  For example, a PSA 3 Snodgrass with Tolstoi back just sold for $106 via ebay auction.  Between PSA and SGC there are 14 copies of this front/back combo graded.  A PSA 3 with Piedmont back would probably sell for about $40, so the Tolstoi back was worth for a 2.5x premium.  This Stovall might be the only copy that was hand-cut, and I’d probably struggle to sell it for $30.

I can hypothesize a few reasons for the lack of demand.  Maybe the fact that you can’t really “prove” these cards were hand-cut plays a role in the tepid response from collectors.  Perhaps people find the wavy borders distracting.  And maybe there just isn’t enough variation visually between a factory-cut copy and my Stovall for people to take notice.  I do find it odd that T206 collectors hunt scarcity and perceived scarcity in many different ways, but will show little or no interest in certain scarce cards or variations.  I believe that a lack of interest in a certain T206 niche will often breed more disinterest.  It’s fun to show off your new cards and share new pickups with friends.  When you’re the only person collecting a certain thing, it can feel pretty lonely after awhile.

What do you think about hand-cut cards?  Do you like them?  Would you pay a premium for them?  Would you rather have the Leifield above, or a normal looking Leifield batting with a semi-tough back like Old Mill?  Please leave a comment and join in the conversation.