Bound by its original gilded cord, this designer album (prepared by the Schmidt Lithograph Co., San Francisco) holds a complete set of Obak's standard 175-subject issue of 1910. Featured are stars from the Pacific Coast League as well as the Northwest League. Decidedly, the album is the lithography company's failed attempt to market their service to the tobacco company issuing the cards, as all of the artistry in this piece is original work - applied in ink. In the publishing industry, this is known as a "mock-up," and it was devised as a marketing promotion to generate production orders. Quite popular in the late 19th Century (and extending into the 20th) was collectors' acquisition of display albums to mount and enrich the presentation of trading cards from specific issues. Most of these albums were pertinent to non-sports card productions which especially appealed to young ladies. And it's only logical that baseball cards didn't particularly meet the fancy of distaff collectors - as evidenced by this likely unique album (i.e., we know of no others in existence designed for Obaks).

The pages in this album measure 8" x 11-1/2", and each of them (20 in all) is ornately inked with an Obak Cigarettes ad and a portrayal of the spirit of the featured team. (Between the two leagues, there were ten teams, and each team was afforded two right-side pages...the page backs are blank.) The covers are heavy cardboard stock, and both front and back are colorfully illustrated. We assess the overall condition of the album about VG/EX as stress has broken the binding cord's fastening holes on the front cover and on a few of the pages.

The player cards (which are indeed cards, and not images of cards) are all meticulously mounted, and nearly all of them in this set are securely affixed with a cleanly applied spot pasting. (The two exceptions are Swain with Vancouver and Speas with Portland which are partially detached.) A closer examination of these cards fairly affirms that most (probably all) of them were uncirculated when they were mounted in the album. There are a numbered few that are in reduced condition, but in nearly every instance, such was not induced by collector-handling. In a word, these cards are crisp ... sparkling clean surfaces and borders, and corners that are ideally sharp.

The prospects for removal of cards from this sort of environment are always uncertain. Commercial adhesives used in that age are usually and readily responsive to solution, though; the set could be quite impressive in a grading company's registry if a decision to separate the cards from the book were to be followed by a successful outcome.