Collector Stories | Allen & Ginter Bird Cards Collector

Birding Enthusiast Tanner Guttensohn’s A&G Collection

What do you get when someone has equal passion for trading cards and birding? One heck of a unique collector. Tanner Guttensohn checks all the boxes.

While in college a decade ago, Guttensohn first discovered the 1888 Allen & Ginter Birds of America set. He was quickly drawn to the beautiful artwork. The 50-card release features lithograph prints derived from traces by famous wildlife artist John James Audubon.

“The art is just stunning,” Guttensohn said. “The colors are super vibrant, especially for a 130-something-year-old piece of art.” Everything about the vintage cards drew him in. “There’s some beautiful typography on the back. I also just love birds. Me, my mom, and my grandmother would just be bird watching together growing up. So, I’d just learn all about these birds, and all their little calls and stuff. It’s just been a reflection of my love for nature and birds.”

With owls being Guttensohn’s favorite animal, it was the horned owl card that really got him to start collecting the Birds of America set.

“I bought the owl card and I was like, ‘This is really cool,’” Guttensohn explained. “Then I saw the card of the robin and that looked really cool, and I got that. I realized some of the cards were gilded, some of them actually have gold on them. I was like, ‘Woah.’ So, I tried getting all the gilded cards. Then I was like, ‘Well, if I’m going this far, I might as well go all the way.’”

Chasing A&G’s Birds of America

Picking up the first 20 cards were fairly easy for Guttensohn. But the more cards he acquired, the pickier he got.

“I’m only looking for these two cards now, versus like, ‘That one’s available, that one’s available,” said Guttensohn, who has a fascinating background as part of the first set of all-male quintuplets in the United States. “At the very beginning, I needed to get any of them to get started. Towards the end it got more difficult.”

Guttensohn bought all his Birds of America cards raw. Condition presented an issue in a lot of cases because of how the original owners housed these tobacco cards. The backs of plenty of Guttensohn’s cards are partially or completely peeled off, presumably because the owners glued or taped them to scrapbooks before later removing them.

However, Guttensohn had a good feeling he would be able to finish the Birds of America set when he picked up the eagle card, the most expensive and most desired card out of the 50.

Completing the Set

After going after the 1888 set for nearly four years, Guttensohn was down to just four cards: raven, scarlet tanager, goldfinch, and cardinal.

“That’s where it all stopped,” he said. “These four, I couldn’t find anywhere for about a year and a half.” Luckily, the scarlet tanager, goldfinch, and cardinal eventually popped up online. It took a few more months before Guttensohn caught a break on the raven card.

“There were a few ravens that kept popping up, but they were too high grade for me to be like, ‘I’m going to get that one,’” Guttensohn said. “I wasn’t going to spend $500 on it because it was a PSA 8 or something. I finally ended up getting that last card, the raven, from this super obscure UK auction house I found on like page 5 of Google.”

In 2020, after five years, the chase was over. A sense of relief set in. “I recorded myself writing a big red X next to the raven, because I had a handwritten checklist,” said the 28-year-old Alabamian. “Every card I’d get, I put a red X next to it. I made a little ceremony out of it.”

It was a big deal for Guttensohn to complete the Birds of America set.

“I just knew the longer I waited, the harder it would get,” said Guttensohn, who can be found on Instagram @tantastic_collectibles. “They’re not making any more of these, and they get rarer and rarer by the year.”

A New Allen & Ginter Challenge

Completing the Birds of America set gave Guttensohn that incentive to work on more oddball sets. Birds of America — which was designated with the title N4 by card legend Jefferson Burdick in his American Card Catalog — has a similar set, also from 1888. The N37 features the same cards as N4, but in a larger version.

“The N4 cards came in packs of cigarettes,” Guttensohn explained. “The N37 cards came in boxes of cigarettes.”

The N37 cards are rarer than the N4, so completing this 50-card set will be a challenge. As of early April, Guttensohn had knocked out just six cards. “It’s going to be a five-year-plus-plus-plus,” he said. But after spending five years on the N4 set, he’s ready for the long haul for the N37.

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