T220 Silver - Uncut Edition

[G1911]

While flipping through my cards this morning, it occurs that another deduction can be made.

The attached Coburn (scan stolen from previous owner) is from the proofing stage or a scrapped sheet. It is from very, very early in white border production, if it is not from the proofing stage. We know this because of the man at left. In the silver series, the man is fully drawn. Coburn is one of two cards with artistic changes; a small minority of Coburn's in early white border production (Mecca factory 649 only - Tolstoi was likely printed at some remove from the Mecca run; it was issued in March of 1911) have the man at left as a blue silhouette, like it is here on this card.

The upside down wrong back features Gans. An upside down wrong back isn't random. For it to happen, the sheet must be put in upside down, which means that the card on the front will dictate what card constitutes the wrong back that is upside down. A card on the left edge of the sheet won't have an upside down wrong back of a card from the middle of the sheet; it will be the card in the corresponding slot on the right side of the sheet.

Now that we know 92% of the sheet layout, we can see if this early white border production matches the silver sheet. It should be noted that, while I am quite confident I have the panels arranged correctly, it is possible final production was different. This is not the only T220 Silver proof sheet that would have been run; we can be sure it wasn't the last as they haven't tested the backs, the silver borders, and they corrected the error on Willie Beecher's card before they started actual production. The production sheet is probably the same layout, as it would take labor to 0 gain to redesign it, but this is a deduction and not a proven 100% fact. Some changes are very possible to have been made shortly after production began. Whether Corbett and Donovan were removed and replaced on the sheet with other cards (almost certainly not full panels of 8 DP'd), left as blanks, or printed and manually cut out/removed is a mystery to me.

Coburn is in the middle rows on the left edge. Gans is on the middle rows on the right edge. This sheet layout matches this upside wrong back (the only one I am aware of in this set) from the white borders. It is of course possible that this is mere coincidence, but it is statistically unlikely. The white borders were very probably produced using this same layout, on 2 sheets of 25 with the second sheet featuring the 25 new pictures and art style that was not present in the original wave. Wave printing and issue seems to have been how a lot of 50 card series were done; usually not so obvious because 1) they didn't change the borders and 2) we don't have uncut sheets of them but their are hints in how certain backs are only available in half of a series sometimes.

[G1911]

National Licorice, after the breakup of the ATC, ended up going into the tobacco business themselves directly. This ad is from 1924.

[steve B]

At a penny a pack I suspect those are candy cigarettes.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by steve B

At a penny a pack I suspect those are candy cigarettes.

That makes more sense. I didn’t know candy cigarettes was a thing until right now

[steve B]

Originally Posted by G1911

That makes more sense. I didn’t know candy cigarettes was a thing until right now

Well, they were, were sort of popular in the 70's, but basically got put out of production because the were "teaching kids to smoke"

[G1911]

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.

[G1911]

The sheet as it stands today, with measurements. The missing Choyinski panel has the white border at left and very clearly is below Coburn, so we know there is not more to the left, and the actual measurement will be slightly greater horizontally than I can show here.

The panels are very slightly curved, and I don't press them together side by side exactly so as not to damage corners; measurements won't be 100% exact from this, but to show the scale.