1922 E120 American Caramel Set and Checklist

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

‘It’s In The Details’

Title	E120 American Caramel
Year	1922
Size	2″ x 3 1/4″
Images	Color Tints
Type	Candy/Caramel
Number in Set	240

E120 American Caramel Overview

The 1922 E120 American Caramel set is one of the more iconic candy card issues for a variety of reasons. The set not only boasts numerous stars but most of the cards in the set are quite affordable.

Fronts include tinted images with the player’s name, position, and team. The player images are inside of a decorative, oval-shaped frame. Backs include that player’s team checklist. One unique aspect of the set is that each team has its own frame design.

The cards are found with both green and beige/tan tints. American Leaguers had beige/tan cards while green was used for the National League. The green is light and can be mistaken for purely a black and white card with a quick glance.

At 2″ x 3 1/4″, the cards are significantly larger than most of the earlier candy issues that preceded it. Featuring 240 cards in the set, it is a massive release. It is, in fact, the largest E-Card set produced.

The set features one of the more egregious spelling errors you’ll see on a pre-war card in that Ty Cobb’s last name was spelled ‘Cob.

Albums … and Back Damage

One very notable thing with this set is that it is common to find them with back damage. Many of these have significant paper loss on the reverse and there is a good reason for that.

American Caramel actually created albums for these cards so that collectors could keep their collections in them. Unfortunately, like most albums of the day, that meant gluing the cards directly onto the pages.

In the years to follow, collectors began removing these cards from the album pages (or other scrapbook pages also used to keep cards). In doing so, they left parts of the cards on the pages and backs of the cards suffered from paper loss, which has obviously hurt the value.

The albums were relatively inexpensive with pages consisting of only basic black construction paper. They are seen today and usually sell for around $50-$100.

E120 American Caramel Parallels

While these were American Caramel cards, this set was also used for other purposes.

First, a blank-backed strip card version exists as well with the W573 cards. These cards are the same but are done in black and white and have blank backs. It should be noted that while the majority of blank-backed E120 cards are W573s, that is not always the case. An unknown issue of sorts exists with blank-backed sepia tone cards. These are generally sold as E120s but do not have the checklists and it is not really known what they are. That only goes for sepia-tone cards – black and white cards with blank backs are W573s.

Along those lines, companies were known to use those W573 cards for their own purposes. In particular, the W573 Cream Nut and Goodie Bread cards had an advertisement on the backs for their products.

Finally, another E120 American Caramel-like set was produced as part of a promotion with the 1922 Olsen’s Baseball Game. Those cards were available as a special promotion from the game company and used the same design and images as the E120s. However, only 120 cards were included in that offering so they used a shortened version of the checklist. Because of the shorter checklist, there is still some uncertainty about exactly what those cards are.