The Allen Ginter Project: Card #2 and 2a - N9 Flags of all Nations

Here are cards 2 and 2a for my Allen and Ginter Type set. I won these auctions waaaay back on September 1st from eBay seller imn875, who apparently knew a golden opportunity when he saw it and sold off an N9 collection in the midst of the '07 Allen & Ginter bidding frenzy. This was back when I was still thinking I'd just get one original A&G flag card just to have in my '07 collection. Since the Topps Flags set was the thing that got me into this mess in the first place it was only natural for me to want to pick up an original flag to go along with the two dozen odd flags I had from the 2007 set. All I needed was one card. After getting outbid on enough flags to to stock the UN I finally won a non-flag as my very first A&G card. I saw these up for sale and figured that surely I could win one of these to put in with my new flags and then be done with it. I started bidding, and getting outbid, and finally this card came up with no one else bidding on it.

Bolivia! Woo hoo. With more pretty flowers. What the hell, I'll probably get outbid anyway. I placed a bid and won it unopposed for $3.99. There were still a bunch of other flags still up for sale and to be honest, I wasn't crazy about this one. Still, I was walking away from this auction with at least one of these cards. A few more auctions down the line was this beauty:


Now this was more like it. Liberia is the closest thing I could get to an American flag without ponying up the 30 bucks to get it. Plus Liberia has a pretty fascinating history. I opened up bidding on this one too, and was once again the only bidder. Shockingly enough, the snipers weren't too keen on these cards with tape on the top and bottom of each card. Did I mention there was tape? Yeah, lots of tape. The whole set was apparently taped together in a giant quilt of flags. Tape that has formed a covalent bond with the card so it will never, ever come off as you can see from the top left corner of my Liberia. These are still pretty attractive despite the tape though, it just allowed me to pick these up cheap.

After doing a little digging, I discovered that these cards have the variation back with a straight title. Other cards from this set have a curved title. There is also a Papal/Pontifical state variation and something called a 'fancy' variation. Oh and Roumania and Corea flags are really really scarce. I didn't realize flags could be so complicated. At least I have a couple of them, anyone need Bolivia?