Posted By:
Eric BrehmPeter, I just laid the ruler directly over the slab, and lined up the tick marks on the ruler with the edges of the card visible inside. As long as I looked directly down onto the card from above (not from an angle), it seemed accurate enough for my purposes. I also have a pretty good scientific ruler marked in very small increments so that may have helped. I chose to use 1/40th inch increments for the Goudeys because that gave me an integral number of tick marks for the nominal card size (2 3/8 by 2 7/8 inches = 95 by 115 40ths of an inch). I interpolated the 1/80th inch estimates by eyeballing the half way points between the tick marks. Could be some spurious accuracy there, but it seemed like the process I followed was consistent enough to get a reasonable set of numbers.
One thing my numbers show is that there are many more cards smaller than the nominal size, than there are ones that are larger. This might mean that the actual size that Goudey was aiming for is in fact a bit smaller than 2 3/8 by 2 7/8 (but not by much).
<edited for spelling>