...here's my contribution: Gus Hill from Allen & Ginter's N43 World's Champions set - a great example of how wonderfully strange Allen & Ginter was long before Topps revived the name.
Hill wasn't a baseball player. He was a champion club swinger, a popular form of athletic entertainment in the late 19th century. Indian clubs - wooden, bowling-pin-shaped implements - were swung in elaborate patterns combining strength, coordination and performance. Hill became one of the best-known practitioners of the sport and that's how he ended up on a tobacco card.
The N43 World's Champions set is particularly spectacular. Unlike the tiny cigarette-card format of N28 and N29, the 50 N43 cards were oversized - roughly 3¼ × 4¾ inches - with a small portrait surrounded by a larger illustrated scene showing the athlete in action. Hill's card is a perfect example, with the portrait almost secondary to the wonderfully Victorian depiction of him swinging his clubs.
It's also a great connection to modern Allen & Ginter.
Today we think of A&G as the wonderfully weird baseball product where a pack might contain a Hall of Famer, actor, musician or champion in some obscure pursuit. Allen & Ginter was doing exactly that early on as Gus Hill was famous enough in 1888 to share a checklist with baseball players, boxers, wrestlers, oarsmen and other champions of the age. Today, virtually nobody remembers him.
And that's one of my favorite things about these cards: they're not simply early sports cards, they're little snapshots of who America considered famous 138 years ago. 1888 Allen & Ginter N43 World's Champions - Gus Hill, Champion Club Swinger: proof that Allen & Ginter didn't become weird when Topps brought it back.
It was weird from the beginning.🙃
