T220 Silver - Uncut Edition

[steve B]

At a penny a pack I suspect those are candy cigarettes.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by steve B

At a penny a pack I suspect those are candy cigarettes.

That makes more sense. I didn’t know candy cigarettes was a thing until right now

[steve B]

Originally Posted by G1911

That makes more sense. I didn’t know candy cigarettes was a thing until right now

Well, they were, were sort of popular in the 70's, but basically got put out of production because the were "teaching kids to smoke"

[G1911]

The sheet layout is now finally complete. The appearance of the Ryan sheet settles the two bottom corners. Technically, 10 slots remain unaccounted for. It seems so obvious that the bottom left 8 must be McAuliffe and that the 2 cards missing here are both Tommy Ryan. The white borders of the Ryan make it's placement in the layout simple; there is more of the brown tape on the back and it's cutting perfectly matches the adjacent panels to the left and above.

This panel never appeared, on eBay or via Weiss, alongside the rest of the panels. I am happily proven wrong when I said it probably did not survive. As expected though it is heavily damaged. The second Ryan in the top row has an incompletely printed "T", and some of the wood flooring is also marred by a print defect that seems related. The bottom left Ryan card has a green spot on his shoulder. Both of these defects were corrected before production runs.

Seller was kind enough to take extra time he didn't need to take to talk about them. Putting together what I've learned before, it appears that the root source of this sheet is a collector of paper ephemera who has unfortunately passed away recently. I suspect this collector is the cutter of the sheet, and that it survived quite some time without being cut into the panels.

I would think that there would have been several sheets run, aligning and testing color, etc. The cards on these sheets are nearly complete but some small changes were made before final production began (The Beecher spelling error being the most obvious one). It is difficult for me to capture in pictures limited to 1mb in size on here, but the panels appear to my eyes to be a higher quality print than any production card I have seen; the colors a little deeper and richer than any of the production cards. I would think it fairly safe to assume there was probably at least 1 more proof test sheet run after this one; to correct the little things that were changed. I would suspect there are several more test runs to do the backs and to apply the borders that seem to be awfully complicated. This is definitely a proof stage sheet, based on the incomplete nature of the captions and the stamping on back.

[G1911]

The sheet as it stands today, with measurements. The missing Choyinski panel has the white border at left and very clearly is below Coburn, so we know there is not more to the left, and the actual measurement will be slightly greater horizontally than I can show here.

The panels are very slightly curved, and I don't press them together side by side exactly so as not to damage corners; measurements won't be 100% exact from this, but to show the scale.

[G1911]

And the sheet recreated as best I can, with production singles filling in Choyinski (extant and confirmed in that slot, but owned by someone else) and McAuliffe (unknown to exist, I doubt that it does anymore).

[steve B]

That's wonderful. Even beat it belongs with the rest of the sheet.

I finally had a close look at the image size, and did a bit of math for other sets. For T206 sized cards, going on what looks like a 50x33 inch printed area the two different layouts work out to 34x12 cards if they're vertical and 19x22 if theyre horizontal.

The 34x12 fits fewer cards, but matches pretty much perfectly with the groupings, which almost always come out to 12 or 17/34.