1915 Cracker Jack cards.

felix76

Is anyone here an expert on these? I might need some help with some raw cards I can pick up that were in fairly decent condition.

I checked e-bay and can't really get a good idea what to look for as fair as real and reprints.

Any help is appreciated.

Philip

stevek

Frankly, there are countless numbers of quality reprints of these cards that always appear on ebay. And too many reprints that are "aged" to look like old, genuine cards. Unless the lot is in poor condition, and you can buy them cheap and so it wouldn't be that costly if they were reprints, I would presume they are not genuine.

Bicem

Can you post a scan of one? I'd be happy to help you out. The 1915 CJ's are my passion - I've put together 65% of the set in less than 6 months and have seen/bought a lot of raw cards.

-Jeff

Carew29

Use ye olde sniffer for Bleach if the card border looks too white. This was done to several cards i know of in the mid 90's. An expert at the National past that along to a friend of mine that gone burned on a couple of them.

Griffins

There are several method to detect fake CJ's. Here's a couple of them:

1. CJ's were not printed with any white ink. The paper stock serves as the white, so that the borders should match any white tones in the card. If the borders are whiter than the rest of the card it's a fake.
2. '14 Cracker Jacks were printed with the backs normal way up. '15's were printed with the backs upside down, so they could be viewed while placed in an album (by lifting the bottom edge up). You can tell by the back which year they are from - in the '14's the back says 144 cards in the set, '15's say 176.
I don't know of any '14 reprints, every one I've seen on ebay in the last 5 years have been reprints of the '15 set. The back of reprints are printed the normal way up, instead of the upside down backs in real '15's.

There are a lot of bogus CJ's on ebay being passed off as real. Buying raw CJ's off ebay is really a crap shoot. Since even low grade ones are profitable to have graded (and bring in more than raw) I'd be very wary.

Stone193

Nice writeup Anthony

Thanx
mike

felix76

thank You all for the wonderful replies. I will go back sometime this week with my camera and take some pictures to upload.

Thanks again.