T220 Silver - Uncut Edition

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

with a 5 x 5 layout I wonder why Donovan and Corbett are so hard to find? I know with the 1948 Leaf set, the sheets are 7 x 7, so something replaced the Graziano as the 49th subject. Since there are no replacements for those two cards (it is a straight 25 card set), I wonder if there are any DPs?

I strongly suspect the answer is: no DP's. Using my own collection (I have too many of these), POP reports, and unique raw examples I have tracked by the image, I don't think there are any DP's. Everything comes out within the regular range of norms for sets with equal production. I had assumed that DP'ing was likely originally because it would be the easiest way to deal with having to remove 2 subjects from this sheet while being resource efficient, but it seems this didn't happen. I was fairly surprised.

Its possible these 16 slots were replaced in a more complicated way. Instead of, say, taking Jack Burke's panel and DP'ing it in Donovan's place as well as it's own original slot, they might have copied 2 copies of 4 different cards, or 1 copy of 8 different, creating a population disparity but not one big enough to really track or demonstrate or veer outside of the norms we see for known 1:1 printed sets.

It might be that they just printed these slots and cut them out before packing. Or the slots were simply left blank. It also may be part of why there are silver and white borders. Wave printing of 25 appears to have been a norm; series not all done and distributed at once. It may be that the silver series was not intended to only get the first wave (the lack of factory 30 is odd and also demonstrates an incomplete run), but with the complications with these two cards (whatever those were; earlier we found op-eds by Donovan harshly denouncing smoking, but he was also personally known by Fullgraff) and the added expense, they hit pause, ditched the border, fixed the Donovan and Coburn cards and did whatever was going on with Corbett, and started printing wave 1 again (with, I think the evidence suggests, a batch of 649 backs first [Donovan yellow sky, Coburn blue man, etc.], then 649's and 30's at about the same time in multiple runs), and then wave 2 featuring an aesthetic redesign of the art style for the single fighter cards to complete the series. The ATC ledger and clean printing of the Tolstoi's both indicate Tolstoi production was at a remove from the Mecca runs. Dixie Queen being before or after Tolstoi, but certainly after Mecca began for the same reasons that none of the defects in early Mecca printing are found in the DQ's. I had thought DQ's were probably a reprint like T213-2 and -3, but the Fullgraff notebook seems to indicate they weren't.

That these sheets and their project managers notebook appeared from unknown but clearly different sources at the same time over a century later is another oddity. Whoever consigned Fullgraff's personal ledger may have other material of knowledge value of his.