This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 5/15/2020
Featured is a terrific example of the ultra attractive and immensely popular 1888 A35 Goodwin "Baseball Champions" Premium Round Album. A recent consignment from a recent find in Iowa the offered relic comes to the hobby after an almost unreal and nearly unbelievable 130 years in hiatus. Known by collectors of 19th Century baseball artifacts as the "Round Album," this incredible piece of baseball history is extremely rare as it was only made available through a mail-in offer for a set number of coupons that were inserted into packs of Goodwin Tobacco. The album features advertising for various tobacco products inside the cover but is coveted for its tremendously colorful and detailed artwork of the game's best players of the era. Delivered with the same delicate workmanship as the tobacco cards but on a much grander scale, the portraits of Cap Anson, Mike Kelly, Charles Comiskey and Montgomery Ward stand alone with other player collages that include Buck Ewing, Tim Keefe, Roger Conner and Mickey Welch, all bound together with a delicately thin rope. While single examples from the Round Album sporadically become available at auction, it's almost unheard of to encounter one completely intact, and it almost assuredly will be heavily creased in the area around the hole, a result of "turning the pages" or being "fanned out" as intended. As with nearly all of the known "Baseball Champions" Round Albums there are condition abnormalities, those are defines as such: While some of the pieces are in fact intact a many of them have broken loose from the central clasp including the from baseball as well as the rear Baseball as well as the Cap Anson round as well as the round with Foster, Brown, George and Tiernan and the round with Whitney, Mutrie, Titcomb, and the mascot. The result is that several of the pieces do show chipping of the fragile edges as well as some slight bit of missing stock. Technically the item grades minimally as G/VG but has a much greater presentation and may make for a terrific presentation if it were to be disassembled and framed as such.