1887-90 Old Judge (N172) Baseball Forum

According to Forbes & Mithcell in "American Tobacco Cards", this set contains at least 518 different players with 2,345 total cards counting all the different poses. The cards are both numbered and unnumbered depending on the players and the poses. There are also three different ad variations: Gypsy Queen, Old Judge, or Goodwin.

If you can get your hands on Volume IV of the World Tobacco Index, the full checklist of all known players and poses is listed on on pages 282-345. 

Unfortunately I don't have a copy. 

BTW....I read the judicial review of the Becket case mentioned in the thread about copyrights. As I understood it a "list of facts" (such as a card checklist) is not copyrightable by anyone other than the person/company that produced the original list. The intellectual work in deciding what players to include and the order in which to list them, belongs to the person/entity that originally produced them. Any other list that includes all of them is just a "list of facts". If someone made a list of the "top ten" cards from a list....that list would be copyrightable. Someone did the intellectual work to pick and chose those top ten players. (that is a different Beckett lawsuit)

Of course if Admin does not want a copied list.....then no copied lists.

Sorry to jump all over this thread, but I'm finding a little bit of validation in seeing someone else struggle with complicated tobacco issues.

Personally, I would like to see you tackle this set. I'd be interested in seeing how it looks in the database. I've been working on adding some non-sport tobacco issues and I quickly got overwhelmed in addressing variations. I tried to tackle the Heroes/Men of History (T68) set and put that on pause because I felt I was overstepping my bounds.

I've stopped adding checklists because of the complications associated with many tobacco and trade card sets.

The only thing I'll say about this is be sure Note has "VAR" in it, and Note2 has "VAR: <good description>" in it.

Vintage tobacco cards are a unique and complicated issue. I would suggest talking with Admin before putting too much work into vintage tobacco cards.  As others have suggested in other forums, the different backs are different brands of tobacco and are different releases.  For example, cards with Polar backs were only put in Polar packs of tobacco products.  So, not actually variations as we think in modern terms.  And it's been long held in the hobby that vintage tobacco sets are considered "COMPLETE" regardless of what's on the backs of the cards.