Dave Campbell contacted me after reading a post on The Baseball Card blog. David Campbell has been collecting baseball cards non-stop since 1981. He has recently created a collection of 19th century Allen & Ginter cards, which he discussed in the following interview.
ephemera: What prompted you to begin collecting 1880's
Allen & Ginter cards?
Campbell: I'm a big fan of retro-style baseball cards. For the past few years, Topps has taken a classic baseball card design and used it in a set featuring current players. The Heritage and Topps205 sets are a couple of my favorites. It was a natural that I'd also collect Topps Allen & Ginter product that was modeled after the original N28 "World's Champions" set from 1888. For 2007, Topps added a "Flags of All Nations" insert set that was based on another original Allen & Ginter design. I thought they were pretty cool and started building the set.
While I was searching eBay for cards I needed, I stumbled across some original Allen & Ginter cards. I wasn't really familiar with any non-sports set older than the Star Wars sets from the 70's and these old cards fascinated me. I knew all about the Allen & Ginter N28s from Bert Sugar's reprint books from Dover publications. I used to play with my King Kelly and Cap Anson reprints when I was a kid, and I liked the artwork on the cards. I was surprised to learn that the baseball players were a tiny fraction of the cards in those sets and that there were many other kinds of cards in that style. The biggest surprise was that these 19th century cards could generally be picked up for a few bucks each! I always thought of Allen & Ginter cards as unattainable, costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars. It shocked me to see an original flag card selling for about 10 bucks. I abandoned my 2007 flag set and started trying to get some of these old cards instead. I won one of them, an N30 "World's Decorations" card on eBay, then I won a couple of flag cards soon after. At that point I decided I should stop and make some kind of game plan for myself if I was going to start a collection of these cards.
After doing a little homework, I found out that Allen & Ginter inserted about 60 sets into their cigarette packs and 34 of them were lithograph cards similar to those baseball cards I liked. They are cataloged as N1 to N34 in Jefferson Burdick's American Card Catalog and I decided to focus on them since they are all standard tobacco card size and are all lithograph art cards. I also decided instead of picking one set and trying to complete it, I'd instead do a type set of of one card from every set so I'd have a representative card from each. That way it would be a little easier on myself since there would be less cards to find, and I wouldn't have to hunt down any specific cards if I didn't want to. All I had to do is find a nice one from each set, and I could choose the cards I liked best. There are many different gorgeous designs among the sets, and it's cool to see them all side by side. I also put one other limitation on myself, I decided to set a price limit of no more than $20 per card. A retail box of Topps Allen & Ginter costs $19.99, so that seemed like a good limit for me to spend on any one of these cards.
ephemera: You've really stumbled upon a great idea Dave. I'll bet you'll have some competition once people know the real things can be had at reasonable prices. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered in putting this collection together?
Campbell: The first challenge that I faced was figuring out how to actually win any of the auctions for these cards. I could see from the cards that were listed on eBay that many of them were selling in the 5 to 15 dollar range, but I didn't have any real clue as to what their value was. You can't exactly go to the store and pick up a Beckett Nineteenth Century Non-Sports Card monthly price guide. In fact, the best and most current guide I've found is from 1999 and out of print!
Plus the majority of people out there who were bidding against me for the cards are rabid non-sports collectors who know exactly what they are doing. I didn't really have a chance at first, and I must have lost dozens of auctions before getting fed up and overbidding just so I could win something. After watching enough auctions though, I finally got a feel for it, and now I have a game plan when I'm after a certain card.
There are three things I look for when buying these cards: The card should be cool, cheap, and easy to win. The best is when it is all three. When I find a cool card that I really like, I just go for it and do a max bid on it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I bid my twenty bucks on a George Washington N15 "Generals" card and then watched the bidding rise to well over a hundred. Then I did the same thing with the card of the Duke of Wellington from the same set, and I ended up being the only bidder and got it for 99 cents. Gotta love cheap cards! I also take advantage of easy wins. If there is a nice card up for sale with a "Buy It Now" Offer, I take it. Same thing if I find a good one with no bids. A lot of times a seller who specializes in non-sports cards will post a large group of auctions at once. The expert collectors will snap up most of them, but there will be at least a few that last without any bids that can be gotten cheaply.
The other main challenge I've had is simply finding examples from some of the sets. I was initially worried I'd never find affordable cards from the N28 or N29 "Champions" sets because the prices were usually higher since they were associated with the baseball players in the set. I just won both of them in the past week though, both in my price range, and one of them is a real beaut. It's a billiards player with crazy eyes and a handlebar mustache that would make Rollie Fingers jealous. Now I'm having challenges finding other sets. When I first started tracking the vintage Allen & Ginter auctions, there seemed to be a ton of the N24 "Quadrupeds" cards up for sale. Since I've actually started buying them though, I've seen maybe a handful. A couple of other sets have proven to be very hard to find as well. The N12 "Fruits" set is causing me problems because it seems like all the examples I've seen for sale are all graded for some reason. It doesn't help that it is probably the only A&G set that I just flat out don't like and I don't want to pay a premium for a graded example. Another one, N23 "Songbirds", is just flat out scarce. I've seen only a dozen or so since I started collecting these cards. I'd actually like to get the Brown Thrasher card from that set since I'm a fan of the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team, but I can't seem to find any of them out there, let alone that one. The good thing is I'm not someone who's real picky about the condition of their cards. I won't hesitate to get a card with some horrible flaw that would make a grader at PSA faint. In my collection so far I have one card that's trimmed, several missing paper, a couple with extra paper on them--perhaps the paper that's missing from the other cards?--creases, tape, rounded corners, and two that have their original owner's name written and stamped on them. These things are one hundred and twenty years old, you have to expect that they would have gained some character along the way.
ephemera: To be continued...
Search Abebooks for the books listed in this interview.
[Editor's Note: Part Two of my interview with Dave Campbell will appear in the coming days...stay tuned.]
