Breaking News!..........................W553's were not distributed in "5" card strips!...................W553's are actually "10" card strips!.................more to come!
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Mike,
Talking on behalf of all W553 aficionado's, I'm sure glad you brought this thread back from the dead. Thanks for the great pics and detective work. You've helped unravel a part of the W553 puzzle. My understanding and the hobby's, in regards to W553 being distributed as five card strips is due to the simple fact that at least a few (4 or 5) five card strips exist (or existed) in the prewar collecting world. To date, no ten card strip has ever surfaced (other then the ones I own, a few "4" card strips were last seen in the 1980's). I know of the existence of one "5" card B&W strip with the following cards from top to bottom (the owner is not a baseball card collector, but promises to send me a pic of the strip in the near future):
Grove, Grimes, Hornsby, Gehrig, Ruth.
I would expect the above mentioned strip to have the Ruth card at the bottom (with a nice machine cut on the bottom border), while the Grove would be at the top (with perhaps a ragged hand-cut top border). From our small sample we can start to see a pattern in the order they were printed (with this obscure set, you take your victories wherever you can get them). From top-to-bottom here is how they were printed:
Fritch, Goslin, O'Doul, Simmons, Cochrane, Grove, Grimes, Hornsby, Gehrig, and Ruth at the bottom.
For confirmation of the "10" card strip theory and the order in which they were printed, we can use Mike's (cut) sample. You can clearly see that most of the cut cards line-up. For further proof, we can use another strip of cards which was right in front of my nose. I feel like a dummy for not seeing this before, but the ten card strip of W553's that came out of a scrapbook also line up.
Here is a pic of strip one (with Fritch, Goslin, O'Doul, Simmons) followed by strip two (Cochrane, Grove, Grimes, Hornsby):
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A pic of strip two (Cochrane, Grove, Grimes, Hornsby) followed by strip three (Gehrig, Ruth):
Strip #001.jpg
A pic of the bottom of strip three (Gehrig, Ruth) displays a nice even machine cut (front and back). Strip #001 with Fritch at the top, also displays a nice even machine cut (sorry, not pictured)):
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Do we all agree on the cut pattern ? More then ever, I am 98.5% convince that the W553 set only has ten cards. A few leaps of faith would now be required to believe the set is only "15" cards. To the best of my knowledge, in this century, no W553 cards of Foxx, Grimes, Blue, Traynor, or Miller has surfaced. Not in VCP, nor eBay, nor any auction houses, nor in any online dealer inventory, nor on this board. Those "5" cards were added to the W553 checklist at almost the precise moment when Leader Novelty cards were gaining a little recognition within our small prewar baseball card universe. Those "5" cards were Leader Novelty cards which were wrongly classified as W553's by the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards!
This time I'm throwing down a bigger gauntlet!!!
Lovely Day...