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Vintage Card values ( Tobacco Issues)

I have just started with collecting tobacco cards and I have noticed some things I was hoping some with more experience could shed some light on for me?

1. With some issues being much more scare than others can value on a card be hurt if it is so rare that most people would not bothering collecting them and as a result killing demand which gives the lower price?

2. Would cards that are not high end ( these would grade out between 3 & 5) demand a higher price in these conditions than say cards from the 40's or 50's because a large part of people who collect could not afford the large amount of money T206 or T205 cards would cost in say grades of 7-8?

3. What dealers would you all recommend for buying mid grade raw or graded tobacco cards from that will not gouge on their prices?

Thanks,
Paul


Comments

  • Welcome to the boards. There are some Tobacco card people here, but not nearly as many as here.

    1)I think I understand your question to mean- There are not many examples of a particular card of a particular set so there can't be many people that collect said card or set. WRONG. There aren't many T-206 Wagners, but there are plenty of people who want one. For some of the more obscure Carmel or tobacco sets, there are plenty of people who will bid on those cards. There are not many tobacco issues that are not pretty heavily collected. If I misunderstood your point-- sorry.

    2)Not really. T-206s and T-205s are in demand in PSA 3-4 condition. The price on any given day depends on a number of factors. It would be hard to compare these issues and the demand with cards from the 40s or 50s. Buy what you like and enjoy your collection. If you are just getting started make sure you START SLOW and learn the nuances of the set you decide on before spending a lot. Some of those E Carmel sets are really nice and can be collected in low grade.

    3)If you want to get good deals on cards, ebay is the way to go. Most of the dealers and their sites charge way to much.

    Good Luck
  • Thank You MRC. You were right in what I was thinking. I have tried the NETWORK54 boards except the pop ups are too annoying. I have been onto Ebay to buy most of my cards so far. I have noticed a lot trying to pass of reprints as originals, but so far out of 40 or so cards I have only been stuck with one that was trimmed.

    Paul
  • mikeschmidtmikeschmidt Posts: 5,756 ✭✭✭


    << <i>I have just started with collecting tobacco cards and I have noticed some things I was hoping some with more experience could shed some light on for me?

    1. With some issues being much more scare than others can value on a card be hurt if it is so rare that most people would not bothering collecting them and as a result killing demand which gives the lower price?

    2. Would cards that are not high end ( these would grade out between 3 & 5) demand a higher price in these conditions than say cards from the 40's or 50's because a large part of people who collect could not afford the large amount of money T206 or T205 cards would cost in say grades of 7-8?

    3. What dealers would you all recommend for buying mid grade raw or graded tobacco cards from that will not gouge on their prices?

    Thanks,
    Paul >>




    Paul -- specifically to your Point 1, a good example is 1914 Cracker Jack versus 1915 Cracker Jack (my apologies -- as it is a caramel issue, not a tobacco one). However, the 1914 Cracker Jack issue is tremendously more rare than its 1915 Cracker Jack counterpart. This is primarily due to the fact that the 1915 series was issued in complete set form -- and a handful of those pristine sets have survived nearly 90 years with nary a touch (though sometimes some were affixed to an album, with the adhesion subsequently removed....). All that being said, the 1914 Cracker Jack cards almost never command the premiums over the 1915 Cracker Jacks comensurate with their relative scarcity. Because 1914 is so hard to find in top grade -- many advanced collectors shun the set and instead focus on the 1915s.

    To your second question -- many T-206 cards in grades 3-5 have an active market on Ebay and other avenues. A card 90+ years old is often very nice looking in PSA 5 condition -- and it still is a relatively good grade, all things considered.

    MS
    I am actively buying MIKE SCHMIDT gem mint baseball cards. Also looking for any 19th century cabinets of Philadephia Nationals. Please PM with additional details.
  • Collect what you like. Don't worry about the grade or whether the set is a popular set to collect, especially with 90+ year old sets. I am casually collecting the T218 set and having a lot of fun with it. I will be happy to complete this set in PSA 3 and upgrade over time. There are not a lot of these graded yet, so I pick up raw examples here and there. I think these cards look great even in PSA 2. Check out my only 2 PSA graded cards (as of today) and I think you'll see what I mean:

    image

    JEB.
  • acowaacowa Posts: 945 ✭✭
    I had a fellow board member reccommend this link for great dealers on vintage cards.

    Link to a bunch of vintage card dealers and enthusiasts


    Good luck in your pursuits.


    Regards,



    Alan
  • murcerfanmurcerfan Posts: 2,329 ✭✭
    Many (in my estimation) collectors of 19th century material are fanatic "type card" collectors.
    so although Marc makes an interesting point on the relative desireabliity of the 2 cracker jack issues, I think most of the "hens teeth" from the tobacco genre are very much in demand. some examples that spring to mind are Four Base Hits, Duke Cabinets, Peck & Snyder, Kalamazoo Bats, D359's, etc....

    edited to clarify: D359's are actually a baking issue, but they are favorites of mine (and I pay big $$ if you happen to have any)
  • Thanks for the replys guys. It has seemed like, as Marc said, that if the cards are too rare to find in a high grade they do not seem to command as high a price as others. I am trying to keep myself to sticking with the T213 Coupon issues so far and the occasional T206. I have had some good success on Ebay except getting outbid by a $1 when an auction ends while I am at school. It just gives that pit in your stomach feeling.

    Paul
  • 1420sports1420sports Posts: 3,473 ✭✭✭
    Certain issues like T206 and 48 Leaf, as well as the 33 Goudey sets have excellent value in PSA 3-5 condition when compared to the SMR value. The main reason is what you have already realized - many collectors cannot afford higher end examples. I have seen many a T206 in PSA 3 go over PSA 4 and sometimes PSA 5 "value". The same holds true for Goudey HOFers and 1948 Leaf.
    collecting various PSA and SGC cards
  • mikeschmidtmikeschmidt Posts: 5,756 ✭✭✭
    And for some vintage issues -- it (unfortunately) seems like these cards are getting trimmed more and more every day. So finding authentic, unaltered cards in "collector grade" is an excellent find and long-term value.
    I am actively buying MIKE SCHMIDT gem mint baseball cards. Also looking for any 19th century cabinets of Philadephia Nationals. Please PM with additional details.
  • GriffinsGriffins Posts: 6,076 ✭✭✭
    On question #1 I can site at least one issue where that certainly is the case. '16 Tango Eggs have about 500 known examples, with Bescher and Jennings being half of those known. Some cards have 10-25 examples, others just 1-2. As such there is no reasonable expectation that anyone could ever complete the set, and the price reflects that lack of demand. Type collectors can easily find Bescher or Jennings, many of the others in the set go for much less than their populations would indicate. Sometimes a card is so rare nobody wants it.

    Always looking for Topps Salesman Samples, pre '51 unopened packs, E90-2, E91a, N690 Kalamazoo Bats, and T204 Square Frame Ramly's

  • murcerfanmurcerfan Posts: 2,329 ✭✭
    Sometimes a card is so rare nobody wants it.

    Anthony...I think that may go for some of the less attractive issues and even for some of the 1950's regionals like Rodeos.

    But as far as tobacco issues (and more and more so with Caramel issues), I think most of the obscure cards are pretty darn desireable.

    We can debate this but I think "sometimes" is more like "once in a great while".

    Old Judges are very popular, but how many collectors of them are working on completing the set ?
  • GriffinsGriffins Posts: 6,076 ✭✭✭
    Dave, think it comes down to supply and demand. There are only a handful of people aggressively pursuing Old Judges, but there are less than a handful available at any given time. Agreed on the 50's regionals, look at Esskay's and Briggs and Hunters. You never see them, so they are rarely pursued. For the value of something to really climb it has to be available enough to be collectable, yet rare enough for supply to fall short of demand.

    Always looking for Topps Salesman Samples, pre '51 unopened packs, E90-2, E91a, N690 Kalamazoo Bats, and T204 Square Frame Ramly's

  • murcerfanmurcerfan Posts: 2,329 ✭✭
    by Kit Kiefer

    In the column-writing business, nothing beats making a correction and then using that correction as a springboard for new columns.

    In some of my first columns appearing on Beckett.com, I wrote about "machine-made" cigarettes gaining in popularity during and after the Civil War. My good friend, tobacco-memorabilia expert Jim Haugen, loaned me a book called Tobacco Advertising: The Great Seduction, which forces some modifications to that statement. Cigarettes were not made by machine until the mid-1880s. However, cigarettes were rolled by hand in factories in the late 1860s and early '70s. The cigarette makers employed hundreds of young women to roll the smokes. A good roller could turn out 18,000 cigarettes in a week. The first cigarette-making machines could do 40 times that.

    So not only did public sentiment turn toward cigarettes in the 1880s, the infrastructure was finally in place to supply public demand.

    We think of tobacco cards from the 1880s only as cigarette cards, and use the two terms interchangably, but that's not really how it was. Cards appeared in many different types of tobacco products, and were just part of multifaceted advertising and marketing campaigns that helped foster a craving for tobacco among American consumers.

    People who used tobacco in the late 1800s used it one of six different ways: they chewed long-leaf, twist, fine-cut, or "plug" tobacco, which was chopped, rolled, flavored with sugar, and molded into a brick; they took snuff; they puffed on a pipe; they smoked or chewed cigars; they rolled their own cigarettes from a bag of tobacco and rolling papers; or they smoked ready-made cigarettes.

    The most famous chewing-tobacco cards are the Red Man cards of 1952-55, but the Mayo's Cut Plug baseball and football cards are also chewing-tobacco cards, as are the 1887 Buchner Gold Coin cards. The 1893 Just So and 1888 Beck Yum-Yum cards promoted fine-cut chewing or smoking tobacco, while the 1910 Plow Boy, T214 Victory and T215 Red Cross cards promoted long-cut chewing or smoking tobacco. Duke's Honest Long Cut, one of the most popular tobacco brands during the Trust days, could also be chewed or smoked. It spawned the N142 cabinets of 1893 and the N135 Talk of the Diamond set, and was one of the featured brands on T207 and T227 cards.

    Four Base Hits, which included cards with its smokes in 1887, were cigars, as were Recruit Little Cigars (T205s), Napoleon Little Cigars (T207s), Number 7 Cigars (1889 Boston Beaneaters), Red Stockings Cigars (1886), Charles Denby Cigars (1932 Cubs set), and Henry Reccius (the 1889 Honus Wagner one-card set).

    Fatimas, Ramlys, Meccas, Hassans, T.T.T.s, and Turkey Reds were Turkish cigarettes, mild, long-burning smokes made predominantly from imported tobacco. They were a fad until World War I wiped out Turkish tobacco imports and steered American smokers toward domestic brands.

    Roll-your-own tobacco with cards included Fireside Plain Scrap (T208 Philadelphia A's set of 1911), Kotton (T216) and Miners Extra (T227).

    Sweet Caporals, one of the brands most associated with sports cards and pins, were an Americanized brand of caporals, a strong French cigarette made with cheap tobacco and rag paper.

    Most of the remaining brands featured on cards were cigarettes, but even then the type of cigarette varied from cork-tips (early takes on filtered cigarettes) to pure unadulterated coffin nails. For instance, El Principe de Gales, Tolstoi, Uzit, Lenox, and Hindu were cork-tip cigarettes, while Carolina Brights, Old Mill, Broad Leaf, American Beauty, Drum, Sovereighn, Cycle, and Piedmont were untipped cigarettes.

    The segmentation of the tobacco business in the late 1800s and early 1900s goes way beyond modern brand differentiation. Consumers didn't jump from one type of tobacco to another the way they might flit between Fleer and Upper Deck today. There's no way a long-cut smoker or chewer would switch to Turkey Reds for a couple of months to get a cabinet card of Hughie Jennings. The Turkish cigarettes were too expensive, for one thing, and for another, he probably didn't like Turkish cigarettes. In fact, chances are he had no idea you could get a cabinet card of Hughie Jennings by saving Turkey Red coupons
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