Mike,
Great choice. The 1939 Play ball set was the first vintage one I completed. It's relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to finish. I'm one of the few like you that is trying to finish the master set. Here's what I know:
161 Cards Total
Produced by Gum, Inc of Philadelphia (which later became Bowman Gum)
Cards #1-#115 were first printed with Upper Case Names
- all Sample cards come from this printing
- It is known that all 115 cards were printed with the Sample back
- lot of all 115 auctioned by Goldin in October 2013
Cards #116-#162 were printed with names in Mixed Case
Card #126 was never issued
73 of the cards from #1-#115 were also printed this way (so 42 are Upper Case only)
So, there are 42 cards with Upper Case backs only
there are 73 cards with both Upper Case and Mixed Case backs
there are 46 card with only Mixed case backs
There are 115 Upper Case cards and 119 Mixed Case cards for a total of 234 cards
12 of the Mixed Case cards also had typos fixed (so the Upper case cards must have been printed first).
Good Luck,
- Dave
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