[nolemmings]

Brian, you do not know him to be the point of origin, and apparently he did not even claim to be the point of origin. He simply said they are fake. He even could have bought them earlier in the day from another dealer from all we've been shown.

I believe the Herpolsheimer story was posted before, but I’ll give it another go. 1920 was the 50 year anniversary of the patriarch William Herpolsheimer’s involvement in the dry goods business, so it might have been a good idea to revive the baseball card idea from a few years prior. Unfortunately, the old man died in February, 1920. His son then died in April. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the tumult caused by these deaths, or simply the business decisions of those who took over led Herpolsheimer to scrap the whole idea such that a prototype set was never completed or was never distributed. That would explain why no others have surfaced.

I hope our researcher sleuths with access to old newspapers will look into the Grand Rapids papers of the time. These Herpolsheimers make reference to the Boys Fashion Shop being on the Second Floor of the store– a fact missing from the 1916 m101-4/5 Herps. If it turns out that is the correct floor than it is even more likely that these are real, unless the creator of the fakes also went to the trouble of great research some 15+ years ago (with fewer internet resources) to add an esoteric and largely irrelevant fact. Even without this info, though, I simply cannot believe these are fake. The paper is spot on. The photography too, and fakes of that era are usually either muddy or washed out. The gloss matches–very hard to do. And of course the backs look like they were printed by the same company as the Holsums and the Shotwells, with similar patterns, fonts and spacing. Finally and as pointed out, the grouping contained players not then known to even exist in the Holsum or E121 sets. Just way too much here to by rebutted by a simple declaration otherwise.