Last week I posted the first half of this interview with Dave Campbell, a collector of vintage Allen & Ginter baseball cards. Without further ado, here's the rest of our conversation...
ephemera: What are your favorite 19th century Allen & Ginter cards?
Campbell: My absolute favorite is my N33 "World's Smokers" card of the Old Planter. Old Planter is sort of the Allen & Ginter official mascot, he's found on a lot of the original A&G packaging and is even incorporated into the design on the back of the N30 set. Topps even used him in their baseball card set, he can be found on the back of some of the mini cards from the set--without his cigarette of course--and he's actually blowing a bubble on their Bazooka gum cards! The one I got is extra special because it has a stamp that states "THIS BELONGS TO JOE. K. DUCK." on the back. I don't know who Joe is, but I've seen a bunch of cards with this stamp on it from the seller I bought it from, so Mr. Duck apparently loved his cards. This of course knocks the PSA grade down a few points, but I think it's much cooler to have a little piece of Joe's collection.
I've been purposefully targeting cards that I like, or that have some kind of meaning (however strange) to me. I'm from Georgia so I overbid for the Georgia state flag. It's nice to see a Georgia flag that doesn't cause a lot of protesting. I chose the Red Snapper card from the N8 "Fish from American Waters" set, mainly because I didn't care much about a card of a fish and it reminded me of the Wheel of Fish scene from Weird Al Yankovic's movie UHF. When I got the card though the lithography was fantastic. The art is incredibly detailed and they used a silver metallic ink on it that makes it look like there are little scales on the fish. It's an absolutely beautiful card that is a tiny piece of art. Another favorite is a card of William M. Singerly from the N1 "American Editors" set. Mr. Singerly was the editor of The Philadelphia Record, and ran for governor of Pennsylvania. He lost the election and died a few years later mostly from smoking too many cigars. If the history of this obscure man, with his own trading card isn't fascinating enough, he also is the spitting image of Frank Thornton as Captain Peacock from the BBC comedy Are You Being Served! I thought that was too funny to pass up, and I even created my own card for Captain Peacock in his honor.
ephemera: These are amazing pieces of ephemera, and your descriptions are excellent, especially the riffs about Mr. Singerly and Captain Peacock. Hilarious. It makes me want to go out and start a collection of A&G cards. What's your advice to achieving success as a collector?
Campbell: The main thing is to collect something you truly enjoy. Yeah, Gem Mint Hall of Fame rookie cards are nice and expensive and might put your grandchildren through college someday, but if you don't have any fun collecting them you may as well put your money in the stock market and be done with it. It's good to try new things and see what you like and don't like. It took me about 20 years to figure out what I really wanted to collect, and once I figured it out I found out about nineteenth century non-sports cards and got hooked on something new.
Once you figure out what to collect, you really need to do your homework. Find out as much about the subject as you can, such as the history, value, grading and whatnot. Then it will be easy to know what you're looking for when finding new items for the collection. If you're interested enough to collect something, you'll probably want to know all about it anyway. I've had as much fun just learning about all these crazy old sets as I have had actually getting the cards.
The thing that has helped me the most is to make a plan when collecting. For a while I just collected stuff randomly and it wasn't very satisfying. I was kind of a trading card zombie, just getting whatever product was new out there and never really sticking to completing anything. Once I started making definite choices about what I wanted to collect--setting up a plan on how to collect and then following through--I've enjoyed myself a lot more. This type set is a good example of that. I set some strict limits on what I was going to collect and how I was going to collect it, but I also left it open enough so I could be creative and have some fun with it.
ephemera: Awesome advice, Dave. You have an excellent collecting strategy. What resources do you recommend?
Campbell: I got most of my information on these Allen and Ginter cards off the Internet. Much of that information was gleaned from the auction listings themselves in the descriptions of the cards. That's how I learned the names and ACC designation for the sets, what they looked like, what the approximate value was and so forth. One thing that helped me was saving images of cards I found online with a description of the card. That was a big help for reference before I found some other resources with that information. I tried doing some Google searches on the cards but there's not really a lot of info out there. That's part of the reason why I decided to blog about building the type set, so the next poor sucker who gets addicted to these cards will have at least a little info to work with.
There is one Internet resource that is absolutely incredible though, and that is the Vintage Non-Sports Chat Board. It is full of long time collectors and the amount of knowledge in there about this stuff pretty obscure corner of card collecting is astounding. I'd say most of my in depth knowledge of these cards comes just from reading the posts on that board. Plus board member Dan Calandriello has put together a web page with some amazing galleries of these old non-sports set. It's possible to get lost for days looking at these neat old cards. The main book I would recommend is American Tobacco Cards. It's out of print, but it's pretty easy to find a used copy. It is a really good overview of all the non-sports tobacco issues out there. The price guide probably isn't very useful any more, but it's still the best reference I've found for finding detailed information about tobacco cards. There is also a magazine called The Wrapper that focuses exclusively on non-sports sets, but I've only read some of the online articles.
For storage, I've been keeping the cards in semi-rigid card savers until I post them online, then I transfer them to a plastic sheet to keep in a three ring binder. I've been printing out the eBay descriptions of all the cards to keep as a reference and they are all in the binder as well. Part of me is tempted to buy a vintage Allen & Ginter tobacco tin to keep them all in--loose of course--but I haven't quite gone that far yet. Once I complete the set, I kind of want to display them in a frame or shadow box or something. I haven't quite figured out though how to mount them on there without trashing them as much as the original collectors who pasted them into a scrapbook. I would like to display them somehow, as they are all very pretty cards.
ephemera: Thanks, Dave. It's been a real treat to feature your collection. I appreciate the time you took to provide such thoughtful answers.
Search Abebooks for the books listed in this interview.
