The Allen Ginter Project : Card #31 N6 City Flags

I can't get motivated today to write about 21st century cards, so let's go back to the 19th for a bit. This is the first Vintage A&G card I've gotten in a looong time which is one of the reasons I haven't written about them lately. It was feast then famine with these things, I snagged all the easy ones all in a two month period and have been scraping to even put in a losing bid since. I finally got one though, and here it is:

This is one from the N6 City Flags set. Allen And Ginter really went flag crazy with two sets of national flags, and a set each of state, city and naval flags. The city flags aren't the scarcest, but they sure seemed that way. With national and state flags seemingly all over eBay, city flags were few and far between. Naval flags are technically the scarcest series but I've seen a whole lot more of them around. Problem with those is I missed out on a United States flag way back in October or so and I've been turning my nose up at ones from Spain, France and Austria ever since.

City flags caused me different frustrations. Every time I saw one I wanted I got out bid. I wasn't overly picky either, I got outbid on all kinds of cities. I tired for American cities and bids for New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago and Washington all fell short. International cities didn't fare any better and I lost Paris, Edinburgh and Montevideo. I even lost Mecca twice. Finally I got lucky when eBay seller ddmues put a 'grandma's attic' collection online for bid. A couple dozen individual vintage A&G cards all from the City Flags set, and best of all the seller didn't seem to specialize in trading cards as you can see from the current listings. If I couldn't win one of these buggers, I had no business building the collection. Plus there were a couple of off-grade lots to pick off if all else failed. Grandma smoked a lot of Virginia Brights apparently. Even the hard core non sports guys can't bid on everything so I was able to snag London for the opening bid of $6.99, well under budget. London's a pretty kick ass city as far as cities go so I'm very happy with this one.

The card itself is pretty nifty. the flag itself takes up the top half with a scenic view from the city underneath. I'm an ignorant American so I have no clue what those buildings are. Houses of Parliament, maybe? And the Funkadelic dome behind them? I'll go out on a limb and say the river is the Thames. The whole thing is surrounded by silver metallic ink and has the A&G advertisement on the bottom. The back has a checklist and a neat title shaped like a banner. Unfortunately this back has a lot of glue and is missing some paper on the top right corner. The corners are sharp and the front is perfect though so it's still a great looking card.

Music was a theme I was thinking about when I was scoping out city cards for some reason. I made a hard run at Baltimore just for the Frank Zappa reference. Paris had interesting possibilities. Can't go wrong with New Orleans or Chicago either. But as far as music with city references go, nothing and I mean nothing beats this: