We're given to wonder if a closer examination of the printing process involved might not offer some insight.
We'll include, below, for closer analysis, the full-sized picture of the strips (not necessarily the full, true, or
accurate size of the actual strips themselves) that we cribbed off an earlier Net54 thread. You can try
blowing it up even larger.
The red and blue strips each appear to have been cut apart from a continuous panel, but the images appear
to have been photographed from pre-existing strips previously cut out of something else -- we're imagining
a sort of panoramic montage that might have appeared in a newspaper or magazine of the day -- and laid against
a dark background.
Look at the edges of the images (not the strips, the player images) particularly on Kling, Tinker-Sh--, and Davis.
The player names on the front of the strips appear to have been cut out of whatever the original source
might have been and taped on -- Kling is crooked, Overall appears to overlap his foot (again, not taped on to
the red and blue strips, but taped onto the images that were photographed to produce the red and blue strips).
The numbers on each strip are obviously handwritten, not typeset -- but without being hands-on,
we can't guess whether the numbers are literally handwritten on the strips, or are printed there
from handwriting on the source material.
