1903-04 Breisch-Williams Set (E107)

Posted on September 27, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

‘It’s In The Details’

Title	E107 Breisch-Williams
Year	1903-04
Size	1 1/2″ x 2 5/8″
Images	Black and White
Type	Candy/Caramel
Number in Set	150

E107 Breisch-Williams Overview

One of the rarest and most expensive E-card issues is the 1903-1904 E107 Breisch-Williams set. The release is one of the earlier known candy cards as those didn’t really become popular until later in the decade.

With black and white images on the front, it lacks the color of many candy card issues. Player names and teams are also on the front and the backs can either be found entirely blank, with a short message (“One of a hundred and fifty prominent Baseball players”), or sometimes with that same message and a Breisch-Williams stamp over top of it. Versions with the stamp are the most difficult to find. The various E107 backs are shown here.

Many of the pictures will be familiar to pre-war collectors as they were featured in other sets. One example of that is the T206 release. Shown here are pictures of cards for Cleveland’s Bill Bradley.

The striking pictures help make this truly an elite set, even using black and white imagery. All cards are rare and the set is known for what are believed to be several key rookie cards of players, including Christy Mathewson.

Mathewson did appear in the the 1901 Police Gazette Supplements set as well as the 1903 Sporting Life Cabinets set, but those are often disregarded as they are more pictures than traditional baseball ‘cards.’

An E107 Breisch-Williams checklist can be approached in one of two ways. 150 cards are advertised on the backs of each card, but to date, only 148 (not including team variations) have been discovered. However, several players have team variations and if you count all of those, the number exceeds 150. The 150 card number is clearly the number of players featured and not the number of actual cards including the variations.

Type I vs. Type II

A little known fact about this impressive issue is that there are actually two different types. Type I represents the ‘regular’ cards in this set.

A second, significantly rarer type, includes slightly different cards. Type IIs are on a thicker card stock and are slightly smaller (more narrow). There may have previously been some debate if these were actually different cards but they no doubt are as some of the print in the border area indicating a player’s name and team are different.

E107 Breisch-Williams Checklist

These cards are exceedingly rare. SGC has generally only graded a few copies of each.

Players with the team variations are, as identified by Old Cardboard: Anderson, Dahlen, Dillon, Doyle, Elberfeld, Gleason, Kittredge, Lee, Lush, McGuire, Poole, Powell, and Thoney.