Author’s Note: The American Tobacco Company’s 1909-11 ‘White Borders’ (T206) set is no stranger to extensive study and research. As a result, nothing I present here may be truly new. Still, I call it “new to me,” and perhaps new to many of you. Be sure to let me know in the comments if this has really been covered before.
Background
Although most collectors have some familiarity with the various T206 card backs, the most common are Piedmont and Sweet Caporal, the subject’print groups” is more typically reserved for the die-hards. Still, print groups for collectors interested in the deeper structure and evolution of the T206 checklist are not only useful, but essential.
If you are not yet familiar with the T206 printing groups, I recommend that you check out these pages from Excellent T206 source website.
Alternatively, you can simply think of the T206 set as one that came out in waves rather than all at once. Apart from minor details, you can think of Print Groups 1-4 as consecutive releases of 155, 200, 60 and 46 topics respectively and ignore the other two, at least for the purposes of this article.
A closer look
What I hope to do here is characterize the second and third T206 printing groups in a way that is far from a random Monster mash-up and should be useful in understanding the evolution of the set. To keep it from getting too abstract, I’ll start with this arrangement of the Brooklyn team set, organized by print group.
One thing you’ll notice about the Brooklyn team set is that all twelve Print Group 1 cards are from different players. However, a similar statement can only be made for half of the sixteen Major League teams. As such, it would be wrong to generalize anything too interesting about the entire set based on Brooklyn’s Print Group 1 cards.
On the other hand, the second and third rows of the Brooklyn image, corresponding to print groups 2 and 3, do provide insight into the larger set. These are the main features you can see in the photo.
- Print group 2 is added new players but no new images from previous players.
- Print group 3 is added new images from previous players, but not new players.
Although these characterizations of print groups 2 and 3 have exceptions within the larger set, the exceptions are relatively small. Focusing first on Print Group 2, there are five teams that break the “Brooklyn Rule” and repeat players from the original Print Group. But even then, all but one country (Detroit) only does so minimally.
Print Group 2 per Team
Heading into Print Group 3, despite the addition of 60 new subjects, only four new players are introduced to the set: Frank Baker, Heinie Berger, Joe Doyle and Jeff Sweeney.
Everyone else in this print group is making their second appearance in the set (at least).
Conclusions
Except the so-called Superprints (Print group 5) and Southern Leaguers (Print group 6), which I am deliberately ignoring, the evolution of the Monster could be most easily understood this way:
After the first set of topics (Print Group 1), the main strategy for expanding the set was to add new players (Print Group 2). Once that was achieved, the next phase of growth (Print Group 3) consisted mainly of adding new cards from existing players. The final push (Print Group 4) did a little of each.
As simple and useful as this explanation seems, I have not come across it while reading on set so far.
#Monster