This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 4/2/2021
Featured for your consideration is a pretty well-kept example of the ultra attractive and immensely popular 1888 A35 Goodwin "Baseball Champions" Premium Album. 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 John 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 pages from the Round Album sporadically become available at auction, it's very difficult to find one 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. This one is missing one of the covers while the other has torn where that hole was and thus, is detached. The other ten pages are still bound together by the original string and are no worse for wear save for the usual age spotting, technically VG/EX to EX overall but with a much greater presentation and may make for a terrific presentation if it were to be disassembled and framed as such.