The sheet layout is now finally complete. The appearance of the Ryan sheet settles the two bottom corners. Technically, 10 slots remain unaccounted for. It seems so obvious that the bottom left 8 must be McAuliffe and that the 2 cards missing here are both Tommy Ryan. The white borders of the Ryan make it's placement in the layout simple; there is more of the brown tape on the back and it's cutting perfectly matches the adjacent panels to the left and above.
This panel never appeared, on eBay or via Weiss, alongside the rest of the panels. I am happily proven wrong when I said it probably did not survive. As expected though it is heavily damaged. The second Ryan in the top row has an incompletely printed "T", and some of the wood flooring is also marred by a print defect that seems related. The bottom left Ryan card has a green spot on his shoulder. Both of these defects were corrected before production runs.
Seller was kind enough to take extra time he didn't need to take to talk about them. Putting together what I've learned before, it appears that the root source of this sheet is a collector of paper ephemera who has unfortunately passed away recently. I suspect this collector is the cutter of the sheet, and that it survived quite some time without being cut into the panels.
I would think that there would have been several sheets run, aligning and testing color, etc. The cards on these sheets are nearly complete but some small changes were made before final production began (The Beecher spelling error being the most obvious one). It is difficult for me to capture in pictures limited to 1mb in size on here, but the panels appear to my eyes to be a higher quality print than any production card I have seen; the colors a little deeper and richer than any of the production cards. I would think it fairly safe to assume there was probably at least 1 more proof test sheet run after this one; to correct the little things that were changed. I would suspect there are several more test runs to do the backs and to apply the borders that seem to be awfully complicated. This is definitely a proof stage sheet, based on the incomplete nature of the captions and the stamping on back.
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