One Card at a Time: December/January Pickups

Man, long time no write, huh?

I’ve been quite busy but starting to get caught up. As usual, though, still buying more ‘junk’ and here’s a look at what I’ve picked up over the last two months.

The big additions were the Cap Anson and King Kelly Allen & Ginter cards that I’ve already written about. Not going to go on another rant about those but it feels great to have wrapped up both N28 and N29.

That’s allowed me to focus on another project that I recently wrote about — the 1895 Mayo set.

I’ve been hard at work there already. When I decided to try to tackle this set, I only had two cards — the Cap Anson and John Clarkson. But I’ve made some progress on the short 48-card set the last couple of months.

I started off by picking up a couple more in October. In December, I found a quartet of trimmed ones. While those are all low-grade, obviously, I’m still having them slabbed, just because they will look more attractive in a holder — especially with SGC’s black matting.

I was back at it in January, adding yet two more. One was a gorgeous SGC 5 of Yale Murphy (and yes, the nickname is because he went to school at Yale) along with an SGC 3 of stolen base wizard Arlie Latham.

Both were pretty nominal players. Though, it’s worth pointing out that Latham was an exceptional baserunner. His 742 stolen bases were second-most all time when he retired behind only Billy Hamilton. And more than 125 years later, Latham is still 7th all-time.

I don’t typically aim for nicer-graded cards like these. I’d much rather have picked up, say, four lower-graded commons for the price of the Murphy, but I also found it to be a good deal given how nice it is.

Sticking with baseball, my ‘under-the-radar’ pickup of the last few months was a gorgeous Patsy Dougherty E90-1 American Caramel.

Now, yes, I’ve already (mostly) completed this set and had a Dougherty. But this one was erroneously listed as an E92 on eBay instead of the much more coveted and shortprinted E90-1. Dougherty’s E90-1 is right there in terms of rarity with the set’s other shortprints. PSA has graded only 19 to date and it’s just a seriously tough card to find.

Clean back and you can see how nice the front looks. No creasing or paper loss and, even with rounded corners, I expect it to grade pretty nicely. It’s at SGC and was just graded a 3, which I feel is pretty accurate, given the corner wear.

So that’s it for the baseball stuff I wanted to highlight. But my favorite pickup actually might be a football card addition.

As you might know, Hall of Famer Red Grange is found in two different sets from Shotwell Candy from 1926. He’s not only found in them, but the sets are entirely about him. One set features Grange as a player and has advertising for Shotwell on the back. The other features him in a movie with blank backs.

I’m not going to go too much in this pickup yet, because I actually plan on writing a separate post about it soon. But I’ve always wanted the No. 1 card in the set and you rarely see any for sale. Right now, for example, eBay doesn’t have any Grange cards from that set at all being offered. There aren’t too many pre-war football cards that I’m passionate about but this was one of those.

Another set I’m passionate about is the 19th century Little Rhody Cut Plug National Sports cards.

My baseball example is not only the key card in that set but it’s quite possibly my favorite card in my collection. One sold on eBay last year for $2,500 and finding any from the set for sale is quite difficult.

I added my third one in the set last month — the crochet card from Italy. There are only nine cards in the set but even 1/3 of the way there (I also have the bowling card from Germany), it’s not really a set I’m actively trying to build.

Okay, I lied — more baseball.

I continue to upgrade the ‘worst of the worst’ in my T205, T206, and T207 baseball sets. I’ve been doing this for about two years now and have upgraded many cards. And the good news is, there are few cards that I’ve got in any of those sets that are as bad as this T205 was of Hall of Famer Johnny Evers.

The card I’ve upgraded to in this case isn’t perfect, either, obviously. But it’s a much more respectable card than the one I had previously with a small tear and a large area of paper loss. The new upgraded card, too, is a rarer Sovereign back as well.

The upgrades are really all over the board. And it’s obviously more challenging to find reasonably-priced upgrades of Hall of Famers than it is common players. Cards like this Evers are not likely to be further upgraded, unless I just ditch all of my other collecting projects and really focus on those three sets.

With others, though, I do aim for nicer ones that are free of creases, or at least free of major ones.

These Hemphill and Doc White T205 cards are an example of that.

These weren’t intentional purchases — I’d been wanting to upgrade the old ones but was not necessarily looking for graded examples. But when I find strong graded ones at reasonable prices, I’ll sometimes opt for those instead of the raw cards that I mostly prefer.

Off into a bit of non-sports, the Charlie Chaplin card from the 1916 Moriarty playing cards set of actors and actresses is one I have in my collection. Still, it’s one of those cards I have bought several times.

In the past, I simply looked for them in any condition I could find them. Lately, though, I’ve been on the lookout for nicer ones.

This is another card I’m not going to get into too many details on just yet as I plan on writing about it soon. But these are generally associated as the first cards of the famous comedian, even if there are some qualifiers to that talking point.

Lastly, I’ve got a card from a set that you will ever hear discussed — the 1893 Lorillard Types of the Stage set (N259).

It’s a small set but took me a few years to actually complete, just because I never really looked all that hard for the cards until last year. But when I did, I realized how tough they are.

I initially picked up a bunch a few years ago and just sort of stopped tracking them. Last year I got serious about finding the last few that I needed and last month, I finally got the last card needed for my set — the Skirt Dancer shown here.

This isn’t a flashy set but the back advertisements are nice. The set also has some really great pictures of circus performers that I’ve bragged about on more than one occasion.

Always nice to wrap up a set.