R306 (Butter Cream) printing
 

I'm trying to put together a virtual R306 printing sheet, and I've been able to discern a fair amount just based on what I could discern on the edges of miscut cards I've seen. From all the miscut ones I've seen it appears that the players were always aligned alphabetically from left to right but that not all players were included on all printing sheets, which explains, among other things, the difficulty of Ruth. For example, I can see that one section of a row went Ferrell | Foxx | Gelbert | Grove (with Frisch notably absent).

In addition to that section, I've figured out the following sets of printing sheet neighbors:

Klein | Kremer | Lindstrom
Lyons | Martin | O'Farrell
Root | Simmons
Terry | Uhle
Waner, L. | Waner, P.

If you have any other miscut Butter Creams that could shed light on the printing alignment I'd love to see them. I haven't seen any miscuts that reveal another card above or below the miscut card, so it's possible they were printed in single strips rather than in a sheet of rows. If anyone has a miscut to disconfirm that hypothesis I would appreciate that.

you have my few miscuts listed and they are side to side as you mentioned, not top to bottom.....

Good neighbors!
 

A number of the cards in my R306 set are sufficiently miscut to deduce their neighbors on the printing sheet. They are:
Earnshaw/Ferrell/Foxx
Klein/Lindstrom
PWaner/Wilson
Wright/Frisch

Very interesting. Neat project. Many of these cards seem to be miscut for whatever reason.

Do you have a scan of the Earnshaw or Ferrell that shows the neighbor? I've seen all the others you listed but not that one.

I love these kind of projects! There's a Root on EBay now that is miscut enough to figure out who his neighbor to the left is.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1933-R306-Bu...item43cbef708f

Muddying the waters
 

The player next to Root is Muddy Ruel.
Here are the scans requested of Earnshaw, Ferrell and Foxx.

A thank you to those who have contributed on here and by email. I've put together most of a sheet. All the aligned images I've created are posted below. I don't have an image of a miscut Averill, Brandt, Bush, Cochrane, Cronin... Hartnett, Herman...or Ruth. We can see that they're only mostly alphabetical. (He's only mostly dead.) Kremer and Klein are reversed, as are Ruel and Root. And Frisch comes last?

I thought maybe Ruel had been misspelled "Reul," but they got it right when the time came to lay out the backs of the cards at least. Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that most of the ones I haven't found miscut yet are at the beginning of the alphabet. Or perhaps it is a coincidence, but here's an alternative, compound, hypothesis. Everything was printed in a single vertical strip, the person(s) responsible for cutting the sheets systematically aligned the sheets at the left end, and the blades were not precisely spaced for the task. Voila: hardly a miscut to be found at the beginning of the alphabet.

If that is in fact the case one would also predict the miscuts to become progressively more common and pronounced as one moved toward the latter part of the strip. I don't have enough data yet to test that, but it's an empirical question and one that future images of the set may shed light on.