Frederick Photo Cards

[prewarsports]

All good. We already fight at Thanksgiving over football game anyways

I guarantee these were printed 8 to a full 8x10 double weight sheet of photo paper. The rough sizes of the cards, their composition as well as knowing how photos of the era were produced absolutely points to this. The photographer cut them up into equal sections as good as he could and that is how they were made and why they look the way they do. The thin side borders were because he laid them out to squeeze 4 images side by side to run length-wise across an 8x10 piece of photo paper and cut them after adding the name etc. The fact that only a few have the logo in the corner also helps this theory as those were almost certainly the corner images on the sheet before being cut up wheer photographers would put their marks. If they were issued with some type of product that would make sense to call them baseball cards, but all evidence including the back stamps indicate the photographer himself was a self promoter plugging his studio.

I dont care either way, I dont collect these, but absent evidence these were put into a product of some type, these are just as much "cards" as several other photo issues with finite checklists. My hunch is that IF the Frederick Photos were bigger and less baseball card looking, they would not be considered baseball cards, but to each his own.

What is and is not a baseball card will never have a definite answer, I am just speaking plainly as a photo guy here, and regardless of how these were issued, these are chopped up 8x10's used to promote a photo studio.