It looks to me that this program by Mendelsohn was a real bust. If there's only a handful of the uncut sheets known, and no duplicates by back, it would seem that not a single advertiser took them up on their offer of 250 uncut sheets for $1.05 each. All of the three uncut sheets posted here are the framed versions, one of which was provided gratis to each advertiser, according to my solicitation mailer, and I presume there are cards known with backs of each of these advertisers for whom framed uncut sheets have surfaced. And if there are only 21 known backs, it can be assumed that this represents the total number of companies that signed up for the program at all. The minimum order for cards was 500 sets, and I'm guessing that most of the orders were for that amount. Are there some backs (Sporting News, for example) that are known to exist in significantly greater quantities than others, indicating a larger order? And the scarcity of complete sets might be explained by the stinginess of the Successful Farming offer, which required advance payment of a SEVEN YEAR subscription to get the complete set of 200 cards. One last question: before the surfacing of my mailer, was it presumed that the cards were produced by the individual advertisers themselves rather than, as it now appears, by the Mendelsohn Company?
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