Which actually came first?

I see many places like VCP that designate the N28 set as 1888 but PSA labels them as 1887.

N28 was issued in 1888

N172 was issued from 1886 to 1890

Best Regards,
Joe Gonsowski

Joe,

Thanks! I noticed the following statement on PSA's site....

"The 1887 Allen & Ginter set, or N28 set, is considered to be the first ever tobacco issue. "

Is their information incorrect?

YES it is WRONG

PSA could change the statement from:



"The 1887 Allen & Ginter set, or N28 set, is considered to be the first ever tobacco issue."



TO



"The 1887 Allen & Ginter set, or N28 set, is one of the earlier tobacco issues."



In terms of mass produced and distributed card sets this would be a more accurate statement.


Edited to add - did everyone notice that I didn't mention that PSA sucked. I was trying to keep with the holiday spirit and not mention that IMO - PSA sucks. It just wouldn't be a nice thing to say at this time of year. Remember, as our parents always told us - "if you don't have anything nice to say about someone then don't say anything at all". Obviously, our parents never dealt with PSA.

Fred...

since you brought it up... which would you say had higher production numbers... N28 or N172?

There are many more surviving examples of any given N28 than for any given N172, but because N172 is such a larger set, it may be the easier "type" card to obtain.
N28 is a set that is relatively easy to assemble in complete form.

What Richard said....

Besides being plentiful, the nice part about the N28 cards is that the image quality is pretty much the same throughout the series. I'm still trying to find a few players in the OJ offering that have nice image quality. Some of those buggers are just hard to find with nice images.