I was asked what exactly was meant by,
"And (assuming he wasn’t at the very top of the print sheet) if you follow the left edge of his card and treat it as a cropping line, wouldn’t a large percentage of the images on the cards above him be sheared off as the cut continued upward??"
So I randomly superimposed a Killebrew IA card (third column from right, fourth row from bottom) over a different IA card in a photo of an uncut sheet, and then drew a line (in white and it's easiest to see it by starting at the top of the image) along the edge of it and upward to show how the cut would've screwed up the cards (in this case) above it. In creating this graphic, it wasn't done to perfection (in fact, it's a bit of an overly conservative reading of the actual angle of the tilt), but this will give everyone a good idea of what I'm talking about…
1972killebrewcutfinal.jpg