1912 E300 Plow's Candy Honus Wagner PSA NM 7 from "The Miracle Set."...

Description

The only graded example!

1912 E300 Plow's Candy Honus Wagner PSA NM 7 from "The Miracle Set." It's a testament to the crucial role that trading cards play in our popular culture that one of the sport's greatest shortstops--a lifelong servant to the game and inaugural class Hall of Famer--would see his primary claim to enduring fame contained within the cardboard confines of a cigarette pack insert. And while we understand that this contemporary issue is unlikely to ascend to the eight-figure heights than a hypothetical T206 of equivalent condition would command, we wouldn't be doing our jobs if we failed to use that iconic card as a point of context.

It's believed that approximately five dozen examples of that quintessential tobacco card have survived to present day, one of which--a PSA VG 3 representation--now holds the world record for the sale of a trading card at a cool $6.6 million. We should mention that card is not the highest-graded example that exists, incidentally.

By comparison, this E300 is both the highest-graded example and the only known example, a fact that makes its remarkable NM 7 condition feel a bit like being rescued from a desert island by a supermodel. It earns every bit of its "The Miracle Set" hallmark through the absolute perfection of its printed image, its unimprovable placement within its wide borders, and a virtual absence of handling or storage wear. The ultimate "one-of-one" rarity, this spectacular trading card will confer upon its new owner the highest and safest perch from which to survey the Dead Ball Era trading card community.

More Information: 1912 Plow's Candy Collection--The Miracle Set

If this is the first time you've ever heard of this early 20th century baseball card issue, you're far from alone. In fact, not even Jefferson Burdick, the Father of Baseball Card Taxonomy and author of The American Card Catalog, knew it existed upon his passing in 1963. It would fall to his descendants in the field to brush away the dust of a half-century and assign the dazzling, lost relics the E300 nomenclature under which its scant few survivors are filed.

This rarest of Dead Ball Era trading card issues represents the beautiful, impractical dream of a man whose two loves in life were candy and baseball. Edward Plows, the leading confectioner of Chicago's Gilded Age, would live to see his franchises spread across the Midwest and beyond, but not long enough to see his passions brought together to create the hobby's rarest and most beautiful trading cards.

It was not until seven years after Mr. Plows' passing that his widow Sallie, with the assistance of her husband's successor at the helm of Plows Candy Company, W. Burnet, that the first production run of "Plow's Candy Collection" cards rolled off the presses, midway through a 1913 baseball season that saw Ty Cobb lead the Majors with a .390 batting average and Walter Johnson ran roughshod over the Junior Circuit, finishing with a microscopic 1.14 ERA.

Like Plows' pricey confections, these trading cards were several cuts above the standard fare released by American Caramel, and later Cracker Jack (which would pilfer some of the Plow's imagery for its far more expansive releases of 1914-15). Subjects were carefully selected from the photographic archives of leading baseball photographer Francis P. Burke and printed to unusually large 3x4" dimensions in elegant sepia format by Con P. Printing of St. Louis. At a production cost of fifty-two cents each--over thirteen dollars in modern currency--these were no common playthings jammed into product boxes, but rather high-quality premiums hand-delivered to the affluent Plows clientele.

The full roster of subjects remains unknown, and it's likely that we'll never know. Today the list stands at about seventy, and the full population of all subjects housed in the slabs of PSA and SGC remains well short of 200. The personal collection from which the offered pair of specimens derives is by far the finest and most comprehensive, with these being both the most desirable subjects and the highest-graded examples thereof.

The offered cards are two cornerstones from the number one rated 1912 Plow's Candy Set on the PSA Set Registry, dubbed the "The Miracle Set." The Miracle Set includes sixty-one of the 134 total 1912 Plows Candy cards encapsulated by PSA with a weighted GPA of 5.45 (7.09 with top pop bonuses). Of the sixty-one cards in The Miracle Set, forty-four are 1/1 highest graded and twenty-three are the only known examples for the subject. The Miracle Set moniker derives not simply from its extraordinary rarity, but the improbability of the issue's very existence.


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