[Michael Peich]

Thanks to all of you for the many nice comments on the T209 website. I hope to have the hand-held/tablet formatting issue resolved by tomorrow.

Frank—Thank you for your very interesting observation. Like Pope the cards of Fullenwider, Hoffman and Stubbe all have a similar T206-inspired building in the background. Their photos were probably purchased from a photographer who sold images of players to cigarette manufacturers. This is most evident in the Series Two photos. Further, if you look again at the two panels of player images, one of them contains Al Orth in his T206 pose. That is part of the reason I think the panels were probably (with a nod to Scott) proof sheets. An individual manufacturer had many choices from which to choose a photo to be used on a card.

Was Pope produced by ATC? I don't think so for at least two reasons. Contentnea was an extremely small, regional cigarette manufacturer. If the cards had been produced by ATC they would most likely have been printed by American Lithographic Company in Philadelphia which, like Buck Duke and ATC, had a monopoly on card production. Because of their size, I doubt Erwin-Nadal, owners of Contentnea, used American Litho. Besides, I wouldn’t be surprised if ATC didn’t own the rights to “doohickeys” and their use!!

More importantly, had ATC or Am. Litho produced the cards, they would not have overlooked printing the tax stamp information required for the backs of all tobacco cards. As Tim and I pointed out in our essay on Series One, the lack of the tax stamp suggests a hastily produced set of a modest sixteen cards, probably printed locally.

Thanks again for looking!

Cheers,
Mike