[nolemmings]

Jay, you pose a few different questions, for which I have only somewhat speculative responses. I can say, however, that Mendelsohn's April 6 ad was to the general public, even though he had recruited company advertisers by that date. His flyer had promised exclusivity to one per city "in one line of business", so maybe he felt that as a publisher he was not competing with any of his "dealers".

I agree that a principal reason so many high-grade blank backs exist is because they were made available later; however, I have not seen enough to conclude that they were not period, nor can I agree that all or most of them were from sheets that were cut up later. Keep in mind that at present I have yet to see any ads for m101-5 blank-backs for sale to the general public. How and when these came into the hobby remains completely unanswered as far as I'm concerned.

Mendelsohn was somewhat of a perfectionist, and corrected several cards that had erroneous photos or caption information in m101-5 when he sought to create m101-4. My working theory is that he had produced and simply elected to stash any m101-5s still on hand when he made the change, rather than continue any misinformation. These somehow found the hobby later, although I would not be surprised if they had been cut already. It seems to me that if they were cut some years later, we would see more better-centered Ruths-- it is often notoriously off-centered--since if he was the prize jewel, great care would have been taken in extracting his cards from the sheets, even at the expense of others. Then again, if the plan was to only sell to advertisers, who likely would want their names on the backs, one would think he would leave them in sheet form to make it easier for printing purposes, so who knows? BTW, we are still only talking about a few high-grade examples as it is- PSA shows 3 graded 7 and 3 graded 8 (assuming no re-submits), with no SGC examples at those levels.

Your Famous & Barr questions have caused me headaches for years. Remember that not only Herpolsheimer, but also Block & Kuhl and to some extent Gimbels are also "mirror images" of Famous & Barr as relates to distribution. I will correct something in my prior post that contributes to the notion a of mixed-up shipment. Famous & Barr actually first advertised on April 14th, not April 8. The smallish ad stated that 20 cards would be available for ten weeks, starting "tomorrow", which was Saturday, April 15. The next Friday's ad was essentially identical. The third Friday ad, on April 28, 1916, stated that "The fourth set in the series" was available the next day--not the third set/series. That is why on my timeline I backdated the first series as having been available on April 8. Maybe it was not available at that time and became so only later, when m101-4 had supplanted its older brother. As I said, I've been struggling with an explanation for these mixed sets for a long time.