Inside the Box 3 (NP Sports Card Review)

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It may have taken three weeks but Insidethebox, NowPublic’s Sports Card Review has finally experienced a little bit of magic.

This week’s box blast was 2008 Topps Allen & Ginter Baseball or as this reporter likes to call it, Wringley Brother in a box.

Allen & Ginter is a Baseball card brand that offers a slew of non-sports inserts to satisfy anyone’s inner geek.

History

Formed wayback in 1875 by John Allen and Lewis Ginter, Allen & Ginter was a tobacco manufacturing firm said to be the first ever to produce cigarette trading cards. In 1890 following the advent of the cigarette rolling machine Allen & Ginter was consolidated along with four of the countries other leading tobacco firms by James Buchanan Duke and re-branded the American Tobacco Company.

In 2006, thanks to a booming vintage sports market Topps Brand sports cards introduced a throwback line of Baseball cards mixing the athletes of today with the stars of yesteryear. The series, which features cards using the same patterns and colour schemes prominent in the tobacco cards of the early nineteen-hundreds reached the peak of popularity in 2007 with the World’s Deadliest Snake inserts.

This year’s set introduces collectors to authentic DNA cards, think a strand of Lincoln’s hair or a piece of Kennedy’s skull . . . oh wait, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.

However the magic invoked by the Allen & Ginter retail box ripped for this week’s Insidethebox was spookier then Kennedy leftovers and eerier than a Joey Chestnut Antacid card. This week after travelling nearly 476 miles from the Garden State a box of 2008 Topps Allen & Ginter arrived at my Canadian office complete with Stephen Harper World Leader Mini Card.

Don’t get me wrong, politically speaking Prime Minister Stephen Harper isn’t exactly my cup of tea but this is a sport card review not a political paper and we at Insidethebox were floored by the odds.

The set contains 50 World Leader Mini Card, one in every twelve packs, so the likelihood of pulling any specific card from a box twenty-four pack is more than a little unlikely. The card it self hardly stands up to the book value of the Kosuke Fukudome rookie card that we pulled from the same box, but on talking points the Harper card won hand down. We at Insidethebox are still talking about this card two day’s later, and the idea is that we will send the card to the Prime Minister’s office in hopes of obtaining Mr. Harpers signature for our office collection.

For a $2.00 card the conversation created by the Stephen Harper World Leader Card could go along way to explaining just why I consider Topps Allen & Ginter a carnival in a box.

Zee