Tristar Flop

Like many prewar collectors I'm a big fan of the Obak sets. Between the years 1909 - 1911, packs of Obak cigarettes came with a card featuring players of the Pacific Coast League and the Northwestern League. These cards are widely considered to be some of the most beautiful prewar cards produced.


You can differentiate between the the three years quite easily. The 1909's actually have a slightly different look on the front, and the 1911's have sevaral cards that have a sort of drippy gooey-like background that are only found in that series. But the easiest way to determine the year is by flipping the card ove and looking at the back design; each year has a different back.

1909----------------------1910----------------------1911

While I could go on quite a bit longer on the original Obaks (and I most likely will in a future post), I'm actually writing this post to ask this question: What were they thinking?


"They" are Tristar Productions and they have released a new line of cards (I know what you're thinking, "Modern cards?!") that have borrowed the name of the old Obaks and the back designs for it's modern release. And for some reason, I couldn't resist seeing what they were like.

I was expectedly unimpressed and furthermore left scratching my head at how these things made it past the various stages of design and approval before they started printing them. They did nail the most spectacular part of the Obak design; the amazing sunset backgrounds.


They decided to make the player's image really dark and dropped the quality of the image so much that the guy is actually pixelated like they took the photo with a really cheap 1.5 megapixel camera.


The scan I took actually brightens up the image considerably as the card in hand looks as if there was no light in front of the guy. You can barely see him on the actual card.


Each pack comes with some old timers in there pictured with their minor league squads and this is kind of cool, except they decided to make them black and white images of the players set against the colorful background and they just don't look right.


Here are the ones I got in my pack:



I did get one card in the pack that I'm happy with though. In each pack, you also get a reprint of one of the original Obaks. I got a reprint of one of the most sought after of all original Obaks. It is the Victoria Bees of the Northwestern League player named Ten Million. Yes, that's right, his name is Ten Million. It's written right there on the card.

I've always liked this card and it will be a long time before I can actually afford an original, so it was kind of cool to pull this card from the pack.



It's safe to say I won't be buying any more of these packs, so I'm glad that I got one card I liked out my trial pack.

Happy collecting everyone, enjoy the hobby.

Obaks and the Purple Stamps

Obaks are a wonderful little group of tobacco cards that were produced between 1909 and 1911 and they represent players from the Pacific Coast League and the Northwestern League.

They are known for having some extremely beautiful and colorful images on them. However, I wanted to talk a bit about something on the backs of many of them. It appears to be very common for a 1910 Obak to have a purple ink stamp on the back. Sometimes these stamps are actually legible, but most of the time I have found them to be more of an ink blotch that an actual stamp.

What are these stamps from? I'm sure there are stamps on Obaks that are not purple, and may be something specific, but the vast majority of the stamps I see on them are this exact color purple. In the image above there seems to be a 7 at the top left. Is that the beginning of a date stamp? I seem to remember seeing date stamps in this purple color, but I also seem to remember an actual name stamped as well.

Sometimes the stamp is barely there too. The example on the left has the purple ink on it, but it looks like nothing in particular. If someone were stamping the backs of their cards for some reason, wouldn't they want it to actually be a decent stamp? This stamp is pointless. It just defaces the back of the card.

I know that when these cards were issued, and even into the 1960's, collecting baseball cards wasn't a big hobby. People didn't care what condition their cards were in like they do now with grading and flipping and the whole investment side of the hobby. But why would someone just ink up the back of Obaks?

Was it just one person with a purple stamp? Was it done at the printer's factory? Was it one collector's way of labelling his own cards? And why do they show up on the 1910 series more than the other two? The 1909's are so rare, maybe they just weren't as plentiful back then, and therefore our purple stamp afficianado may not have collected them. But if he was so into the 1910's that he wanted to stamp them all, why not continue with the 1911 series when they came out?

Have you ever noticed these stamps? Do you know what they are or can you give me any insight into them at all? Do you have one that is very legible to share with me? Let me see it, send me a scan.

Here's a few more to see. Click on them to see the larger images.

Click on "comments" below to leave me a comment please.

Enjoy the hobby all...