The Rebirth of the T207- Brown Background Set – 100 years later

                             
A couple years ago, when I was co-writing my first e-book, Before there was Bubble Gum: Our favorite pre-World War I baseball cards, I became fascinated by the unique look of the T207 set. The T207 set, commonly known as the brown background set, was originally manufactured by the tobacco industry giant, the American Tobacco Company, in 1912. The T207 baseball cards measure 1½” by 2-5/8”. Shortly after this set was printed, the American Tobacco Company would be dissolved due to the Sherman anti-trust legislation that broke the monopoly on tobacco.

 The T207 baseball card set is a true hobby classic. The 200-card T207 set contains 13 players that are in Baseball’s Hall-of-Fame, including Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Frank Chance, John McGraw, Smokey Joe Wood and Joe Tinker. Two interesting T207 cards are Eddie Cicotte and Buck Weaver, who were members of the 1919 White Sox and banned from the game for life.


 Being a big fan of reprint sets, as they give collectors who may not have the time or money to collect the original set the opportunity to enjoy the cards; I was always disappointed that the T207 cards are the most famous of the pre-war sets that has never been offered in the form of a reprint set. This is something special about being able to hold the cards in your as you go the set and look at the players. I must not be alone in my opinion, as DeansCards.com sells quite a few reprint singles and complete sets every year. For that reason, I decided we should recreate and issue a T207 reprint set. To do so, we created a new company called Dean’s Reprints and began securing the needed images.

The T207 reprint set turned out to be quite an undertaking, and took us two years to complete! The other thing that delayed the T207 reprint set was that I also attempted to finish my first book to be issued in print form. Both projects are now complete and available for purchase.

 Due to the quality of the century old cards, almost all of the T207 images needed to be retouched. Great care was given making sure that the reprint cards remained true to the original set. The original T207 set includes eight possible backs containing the name of tobacco brands in which the original cards were enclosed. We included a variety of these backs in the reprint set including three cards containing the ultra-scarce “Red Cross” backs. We were careful to use those backs on cards, whose originals have been discovered with a Red Cross back.

 One of the most interesting features of the T207 baseball card set are the player biographies on the back of the cards. Each of these bios needed to be retyped. We were careful to stay true to the original fonts and leave the original century old misspelled words. The one “improvement” that I could not resist was suggested by my teenage son, Jonathan. Jonathan collects cards and commented what a pain it was to keep un-numbered sets organized. For that reason, we numbered each of the cards in the set. I did not feel too bad about adding this one improvement since we felt that we clearly needed to also indicate that every card was a “REPRINT” and not an original. I hope that the hobby purists will forgive us for these minor changes.

Take Care,
Dean Hanley


 TO PURCHASE A T-207 REPRINT SET PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Dean Hanley is an authority on vintage sports cards and has written numerous articles on the topic. Mr. Hanley is the founder DeansCards.com, and with well-over one million vintage cards in inventory, DeansCards.com is the largest seller of vintage cards on the web. Dean is author of the new book, “Bowman & Topps Baseball Card Sets of 1948-1955”, which is now available for sale at Amazon.com. Dean has also published “Before there was Bubble Gum: Our Favorite Pre-World War I Baseball Cards”, which is also available in eBook form at Amazon.com .Please visit www.DeansCards.com to purchase this T207 Set.


If you are looking to sell your cards we would be happy to hear from you. Please fill out our sell your collection form here and we will be in touch.

The Bubble Gum Card War: The Great Bowman & Topps Sets from 1948 to 1955 by Dean Hanley.

 Dean’s new book The Bubble Gum Card War: The Great Bowman & Topps Sets from 1948 to 1955 is now available for purchase. For over two years, everyone here at Dean’s Cards worked hard to put this book together.

The Bubble Gum Card War: The Great Bowman & Topps Sets from 1948 to 1955, by Dean Hanley is now available on Amazon.com in both e book and paperback.


 “In 1951, Bowman's short-lived baseball card monopoly was broken by Topps and the great Baseball Gum Card War was in full swing. Consumers almost always benefit from competition in the marketplace and the card collectors were no exception during the Baseball Bubble Gum Card War. The result was the birth and rapid evolution of the modern baseball card.

 Each spring during the years of 1952 to 1955, American boys had their choice between two great sets of baseball cards. The boys would cast their votes for their favorite issue of the year by sliding nickels across the counter of America's dime-stores to purchase baseball cards from either Topps or Bowman. These wonderful Topps and Bowman sets of the early 1950s sparked the addiction of an entire generation of boys to the hobby of collecting baseball cards.By the end of the decade, 89% of American boys would be collecting baseball cards.

 This battle between Topps and Bowman, for control of the baseball card market, became known as "The Great Baseball Card Bubble Gum War." This contest was fought with such ferocity, that shortly after the war began it became clear that only one company would be left standing at the conclusion of hostilities. The winner would take all.

 This epic conflict for the control of America's favorite collectible is brought to life by the author, Dean Hanley, who is a long-time collector and the founder of DeansCards.com, which has the largest online inventory of vintage sports cards ever assembled. Dean writes a popular blog and has had dozens of articles about vintage baseball cards published in the "Sports Collectors Digest."

 Mr. Hanley is also the co-author of the eBook, "Before there was Bubble Gum: Our Favorite Pre-World War I Baseball Cards."

Mr. Hanley combines his love of vintage sports cards, over forty years of card collecting experience, and extensive research to bring to life this fascinating battle for control of the bubble gum card market. Hanley examines each of these vintage baseball card sets from the era, details the evolution in the design of the cards, the companies that produced them, and the two visionary men that made these wonderful cards a reality and started a hobby that continues to this day.

"The Bubble Gum Card War: The Great Bowman & Topps Sets from 1948 to 1955" is a must for baseball card collectors and a fun read for fans of any age.”

  

 Dean Hanley is the founder of DeansCards.com Dean’s Cards is the #1 seller of vintage sports cards and has over a million cards posted online for sale. If you are looking to sell your cards we would be happy to hear from you. Please fill out our sell your collection form here and we will be in touch.

The Bowman Gum Company

Jacob Warren Bowman’s biography reads like a fictional character in a movie. Warren Bowman liked to brag that he had been “married, divorced and bankrupt before he turned twenty one years old.” Bowman was six-foot-three and weighed 200 pounds with an ego to match. Known as a playboy, Bowman was also as loud, as he was large. One observer noted, “When people met Bowman for the first time they were alarmed by his loud booming voice.”


 Bowman was born in Ohio and reared in New Mexico. At 18, Bowman moved to Los Angeles and launched a used car business that went under by the start of World War I. After that Bowman worked in Los Angeles as a police officer, until he was caught by a superior officer, in a squad car filled with young women.

 Bowman was a natural born entrepreneur and risk-taker. According to a 1937 Time Magazine article, “After going broke he settled down to work for the Overland used-car agency in Los Angeles until one day he heard that a steam laundry was badly needed in Tampico, Mexico, to wash oil workers' dirty shirts.”


 “By the time Bowman got to Tampico a local group had already started a steam laundry, so he bought a little motor boat to pull barges. When this enterprise failed, he and another young American chugged off to Veracruz, conceived the idea of revolutionizing the mahogany trade by floating mahogany logs down the rivers to the Gulf. The two adventurers struggled for several days getting a mahogany log out of the forest into a small stream, where, since mahogany is heavier than water, it immediately sank.”

Bowman eventually landed in Philadelphia with only $25 left to his name and started producing bubble gum, an idea that he came up with after a conversation with a gum salesman he met on a cross-country train ride. Bowman founded Gum, Inc., in Philadelphia in 1927. Within two years, Bowman’s “Blony” brand became the #1 selling penny bubble gum and after ten years, Blony had 60% of the U.S. market share of bubble gum sales.



 In his book, “Mint Condition”, Dave Jamison referenced a contemporary report saying that “inside his Philadelphia plant, Bowman presided over a Dr. No-like office, in which the walls were covered with mirrors and he used an electronic switch to buzz in visitors. He would throw another switch to open a hidden door to his conference room, where there was a cocktail lounge and bar.”

The story of Warren Bowman’s life was surreal and colorful. Stories about the man could fill a book. In the 1930’s, Bowman was removed as president of his company by the shareholders, but eventually recaptured control. He went through five wives, the last of which was 28 years his junior. Opinions on the character of Warren Bowman vary greatly, but just about all of his contemporaries agree that it was Bowman’s creativity, leadership and drive than made his company the leading seller of bubble gum.

Bowman’s success was in the cards 


Seeing the sales success that his competitors were having selling gum with cards, Bowman would not be left out. Seeing that the over-crowded baseball card market of the mid-1930’s left no room for profits, the insightful Bowman decided to enter the card market with a non-sporting theme – at least for the time being.


In 1936, Bowman issued his first card set, which was called “the G-Men and Heroes of Law Enforcement.” This set had a modest popularity, but Bowman was now in the card business and his major bubble gum card triumph was about to begin.

One night, while listening to a radio broadcast detailing the atrocities of the Sino-Japanese War, Bowman came up with the concept for the greatest non-sports set ever produced. Issued in 1938, the 240-card Horrors of War set gave a very pro-American view of the recent history of the Chinese-Japanese War, the Ethiopian War, and also the Spanish Civil War. Bowman later issued another 48 cards for the set that featured Nazi-Germany as the main aggressor.


A bubble gum card depicting war was not a new idea, but the 1938 Bowman Horrors of War Set took the concept to a whole new level and remains a hobby classic to this day. The graphics feature bayoneted victims, men in violent hand-to-hand struggles and the slaughter of innocent women and children. The Horror of War cards had tile such as: # 18 Japanese Bomb Orphanage and # 24 Italian Squadrons Flying Low Slaughter Ethiopians.


First offered in a series of 24 new cards every two weeks, Gum, Inc. produced the cards in what at the time was the state-of-the-art, full-color lithography process. This resulted in the proper reproduction of the brilliance and detail of the original art.

 President Franklin D. Roosevelt even used the cards as examples of the atrocities occurring overseas in an effort to awaken America from its isolationist stance. Roosevelt’s "bubblegum diplomacy" only helped to increase the popularity of the 1938 Horrors of War set.

Although the fascist regimes of Italy, Spain and Japan were all targeted , it was the Japanese who took the greatest offense, or at least had the greatest ability to show their outrage, towards Bowman. The Japanese people loved bubble gum. Having opened his first bubble gum factories in Japan in 1932, Bowman and Gum, Inc. were forever banned from doing business in the Japanese Empire and were forced to halt all gum production on the island.

 The set was so successful, that Bowman printed over 100 million Horrors of War cards. This is an incredible number, when you take into account that the country was in the middle of the Great Depression. At one point, Bowman was making $40,000 per week profit from the cards. Although Bowman would continue to issue sets of bubble gum cards containing scenes of war, none would come close to the success achieved by this classic set.


This article is taken from Dean’s upcoming book “The Gum Card War and the Great Bowman & Topps Baseball Card Sets of 1948-1955”, which is now available for sale at Amazon.com. 

Dean Hanley is an authority on vintage sports cards and has written numerous articles on the topic. Mr. Hanley is the founder DeansCards.com, and with well-over one million vintage cards in inventory, DeansCards.com is the largest seller of vintage cards on the web. Dean has also published “Before there was Bubble Gum: Our Favorite Pre-World War I Baseball Cards”, which is also available in eBook form at Amazon.com and has just released a T207 reprint set. For more information, please visit www.DeansCards.com