Thanks guys. The head scratcher for me these past few years was the use of the “Pete Baumann” picture. I figured Mendelsohn meant Paddy Baumann, as Baseball reference shows no Pete or Peter Baumann ever playing big (or minor) league ball. Paddy is not in the E135 set, or the connection would have been easier. And it seems odd Mendelsohn would choose this 31 year-old utility player to showcase his “Hall of Fame” set, other than perhaps to offer him as one of “All the New Stars” not present in the previous year’s effort. Still, Mendelsohn’s ads for m101-4 featured a good but not great Del Pratt for the sole picture, used a photo different from that actually shown on the card, and carried a caption different from what ultimately was employed in production. Moreover, some of the store ads for m101 claimed Matty was in the set when in fact he was not. Thus, I decided mistakes or changes could have been made, and not to get too hung up on the player selection but instead focus on the card design. FWIW, here is the LOC photo of Baumann that Mendelsohn used, next to the awful digitalized photo copy I had to use before yesterday.
The identical design is the icing on the cake, but like I mentioned, there were other general indicators as well.
1. The E135 sets were also comprised of 200 cards, like Mendelsohn’s M101s the preceding year. Although a nice round number, this is not a common total for pre-war card sets; in fact, except for T207, it seems only the card sets from 1916 and 1917 claim this exact number of subjects. We know the m101s were printed on one sheet. Sheet or at least row configuration may have been the same for both sets. Such configuration might have been readily copied by another printer without much difficulty, but was certainly already known to Mendelsohn, and likely easily adaptable for the larger cards of 1917.
2. The card set layouts are similar. Both are numbered and are roughly in alphabetical order, again different from sets that preceded them as well as most of those following for the next ten or more years. In addition, the Collins-McCarthy set makes reference to “Baseball’s Hall of Fame” on the back, a selling point in Mendelsohn’s flyer for m101s the previous year and also found on the ad backs for the Holmes to Homes and Weil Baking cards he printed. Although Mendelsohn didn’t coin the phrase and it could have been common parlance, it is a point of similarity nonetheless.
3. Two of the five known advertisers for E135-style cards were with Mendelsohn just the year prior. Weil Baking and Standard Biscuit both used his services in obtaining the m101-like cards they distributed in 1916, and their 1917 versions used identical backs. If Mendelsohn maintained the back designs, it would be easy to use these again. Even if these businesses owned the rights to them and could look elsewhere for production, one wonders why they would. Assuming the promotions were a success in 1916, why change publishers? Unless pricing was an issue, Mendelsohn was still in the business. If the promotion had not been successful in 1916, then why repeat it at all, much less with a very similar design and photography, with the identical subject number and back advertisement? The decision of these two advertisers to repeat their baseball card advertising under these very similar circumstances suggests they were still using Mendelsohn.