The Allen Ginter Project : Card #29 - N32 The World's Racers

Last night I was having major motivational problems. Wednesdays are now essentially Fridays for me now with the added bonus of getting to chase kids all weekend. So to say I was not really interested in doing anything productive after a week of work is an understatement. I stared at an unfinished vintage post for quite a long time before giving up and watching some science program on PBS. I came back to the post after enriching my mind and still drew a blank. Speaking of drawing, meh. No sketch cards were created last night. No art of any kind was created unless ponies hastily scribbled counts. It was Merry Archivesmas on the blogs and Twitter, and honestly the set does nothing for me. Short prints in Archives? T'ain't natural. So last night was pretty crummy all around. UNTIL....

Failing in my attempt to write a post languishing in my draft folder since January, I decided to plumb the depths of my abandoned posts and found an interesting one from 4/14/09. Yep, over 3 years ago. Remember when I was trying to complete a type set of original Allen & Ginter cards but got down to a few scarce cards and then quit eBay because they were shoving PayPal up our butts, thus eliminating the only place I ever found original Allen & Ginter cards and stymieing my quest even though it didn't matter anyway since I was unemployed and broke? No, you don't. Not even people who were reading the blog regularly in 2009 remembers that. Hell, I barely remember that. Anyway, I found an interesting post from 2009. Guess what?

PONIES.

THAT'S WHAT.

I'm slowly but surely realizing that my unnatural pony obsession has far deeper roots than I originally thought. Here's a card from 1890 featuring the racehorse Tristan. The card was inserted in Kinney Bros. Cigarettes, a company best known for their Sweet Caporal brand. Kinney had three horse racing sets in 1890: N229 Famous Running Horses (American), N230 Famous Running Horses (British) and N231 Great American Trotters. Tristan here's a Brit from the N230 set.

25 little ponies gets you one big fat 8 X 10 cabinet card of a full fledged horse. Horse racing was a very popular pastime in the late 19th century and there were a handful of trading card sets produced at the time. Including...

Allen & Ginter's N32 The World's Racers set featured 50 famous racehorces. There was no larger sized 2 7/8 x 3 1/4 inch version of the set as is the case with several A&G sets, but there is an album (A18) full of champion ponies. As usual, Allen & Ginter have some of the nicest lithography on their cards. Sadly this card is slightly spoiled by one of the most unfortunately placed stains in the history of carddom. If you don't see it, I'm not pointing it out.

The Kinney and A&G checklists overlap quite a bit, but Kingmate and Tristan are unique to their sets. Might be unique, period. The other two big two Tobacco card manufacturers, Duke and Goodwin had their own equine inserts, but Duke focused on breeds of horses instead of racers and Goodwin's set is so scarce I can't find a checklist. To this day I can't find a damn thing about Kingmate online, but Mad Guru e-mailed me a nice bio on Tristan a looooooong time ago. Belated thanks to Mad Guru for a cap to this very belated post.

And now here's some obligatory pony music for a post about perfect stallions.



Hey, I didn't force you to click play, did I?