Posted By:
WalterGentlemen:
Please allow me to muddy the waters a little bit. I collect the T59 Flag Set and one series from Recruit Little Cigars has overprints.
So far there are only 17 known cards out of the series of 50 with this overprint and all of them occur in Series 2. This begs the question of why only 17 cards? And to this question I have no answer. But allow me to throw out a hypothesis. The cards were printed on sheets that were 17 cards wide by 16 cards deep making each sheet 27.625 inches wide by 44 inches long. Each series of 50 was printed on 3 sheets with one double printed card (17*3 -1=50). Each row consisted of the same cards--17 different on each of the first 2 sheets and 16 plus one double print on the third sheet.
Theoretically with the Flag set, one of these 17 card sheets was the last sheets in the print run and were no longer needed at Factory 25. They were overprinted and sent to Pennsylvania Factory 240 thereby accounting for the 17 overprints that are known today.
I offer this because the size of the uncut sheet seems reasonable and most card sets with this standard tobacco sized card are 50 card sets. I can't see that American Lithographic would make a new setup for each set. It makes sense to me that they would try to standardize the layout.
Always looking for T59 Flag cards and T113 Types of Nations.
http://www.t59flags.com