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Old 12-16-2003, 06:57 PM
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Default W575 and W573 vs "D-unc" vs E120 and E121

Posted By: brian p

I believe that in the case of the Gertenreich and Clark' Bread issues, that these cards would be inaccurately labelled as a "W" cards. Burdick set up his classification system with the W designation to indicate cards that were originally sold in strips of multiple subjects. As far as I know, these two issues plus some of the other E-121 related sets such as Witmor's candy and Gassler's were not issued in this fashion, but rather singly with product. Having not seen examples in person of these cards, I can not say for certain whether they were factory or hand-cut, but my guess is that they are factory cut. The photos of these issues in the catalogs would also seem to indicate that they were not stamped after the fact, but instead the backs were printed at the time of production. They used the same photo source as the E121's, but due to their relative scarcity, it is up to question whether all 120 cards were issued or not for each of these rare issues.

I think a more appropriate designation for these issues would be E-Unc for the cards with candy mfg. ads on the back, and D-Unc for those with bread company ads. Sometime between the last American Card Catalog in 1960 and the issuance of the Sports Collectors Bible in the mid-seventies, Clark's Bread and Gassler's Bread were given designations of D381-1 and D381-2, respectively, but I believe these later designations are not valid because the cards have no connection to the D381 Fleishmanns issue. So until someone takes over the mantle of card classification dictator and puts out a totally revised listing of baseball card issues, we are stuck with the "-Unc" designation.

Brian

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