I was looking over at the recent PWCC thread and noticed Val talking about some 1921 D350-3 Standard Biscuit cards that recently sold on ebay. It is a set that I collect pretty aggressively so I was a bit bummed I had missed them, that is until I looked at the scans.
Something isn't right with these cards, which were VERY high grade for the issue and look like they were printed yesterday with crazy sharp corners. That being said the thing that is "off" about them is the printing on the back.
I have collected these for years and below is the back of one of the cards from my collection, please notice how crisp the printing is on the back of the card and how well-delineated the individual letters and even the little tick marks are all around the edges. The backs were most likely printed by the same company producing the cards themselves and one would expect the "clarity" of the print to be similar on the front and the back...
Now, here is one of the backs from the recent ebay auctions, notice how "blurry" the back printing is, especially the tick marks around the edges. It almost looks like someone made a rubber-stamp of some sort and just stamped the back of the cards...
I have been collecting these for years and have 10-15 of them in my collection and have never seen backs like the ones that just sold, I just wished I had seen them when they were live so that perhaps I could have alerted the forum to their dubious nature.
Not having the cards in front of me I don't want to speak to the authenticity of the cards themselves as they may be legitimate blank backed W575-1 cards (probably not though but will hold off judgement) that have had a deceptive back added to increase value. I appreciate everyone else's opinions on the matter.