Posted By:
Joe_G.Great questions Paul, ask and you shall receive.
The McPhee, Beckley, and Galvin cabinets can all be viewed at the Baseball Hall of Fame upon special request through the library. They have an impressive collection of ~250 cabinets (compared to ~450 N172s).
About the cropping on cabinet cards, most cabinets that can be dated to 1888 (such as the colored mounts or certain player/team variations) have a smaller gap (larger photo) while the 1889 cabinets do in fact usually have a larger gap (more aggressively cropped photo). However, there is overlap so no definitive statement was included in the cabinet chapter. For example, the 1888 black mount of Wiedman (pg 61) has a fairly large gap equal to some 1889 cabinets.
The Wharton-Tigar collection was of great interest but our belief that high resolution scans or photos of cards would not be possible kept us from making the trip. The collection does contain other baseball cards yet only a small percentage is baseball. The total number of cards, reported to be 2 million!!, far exceeds the Jefferson Burdick collection (~300,000 cards).
I'm not sure about your final question regarding Art Whitney. There is certainly more than one cabinet of Art with dog but I don't personally recall seeing a "Dogs Head" example. I do not have my reference materials with me at this time so maybe Jay, Richard, or others can chime in.
Best Regards,
Joe Gonsowski