Purpose of B18 Blankets

[swarmee]

Originally Posted by cubman1941

There wasn’t a rhyme or reason to the lettering or numbering of those sets, it was just a way to tell them apart.

Part of a collectible series of baseball team felts given as a premium by cigar stores and manufacturers for blotting the ink from a nib pen.
So there we have it! 106 years after their creation, the world knows once again what these “blankets” were originally intended to be: pen wipes. "

Still don't have a period source; that's just a modern attribution, as far as I can tell. All of their tobacco felts are listed as "pen wipes", with the disclaimer that "Due to ongoing research, information about this object is subject to change."
May be right, may be wrong. But the article writer's quote I bolded is incorrect. The letters have meanings, and the numbers are grouped in such a way that they also have meaning, just like the numbers in the Dewey Decimal system have meaning.

Here's my counterpoint. They declare the national flag blankets as pen wipes as well.
https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibit/pen-wipe-tobacco-82

Pen wipe/ tobacco
OBJECT NUMBER:
2002.1.2852
DATE:
1912-1930
MEDIUM:
Cloth
DIMENSIONS:
11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in.
DESCRIPTION:
A brown cotton felt cloth pen wipe, printed with a 48 star American flag, with a red and blue border decorated with ribbons, swags and striped shields with a brown border. Part of a series of Flags of the World given as a premium by cigar stores and manufacturers for blotting the ink from a nib pen.
CREDIT LINE:
Gift of Bella C. Landauer

Does anyone believe that in 1910 an American company printed a US flag on an item meant to clean soot off a fountain pen? I remember how much outrage bathing suits printed with American Flag symbology were causing back in the 1980s. Making an item intended to be soiled and then thrown away depicting an American Flag a hundred years ago would have been ridiculous. I would say the labeling on nyhistory.org is lazy and the article writer's republishing that attribution as some kind of fact is also lazy.
Weren't many of these items redemptions as well from coupons or order booklets? There should be some paper trail if these were manufactured with the intent of being pen wipes.