Two hour interview with.... Bill Mastro

[G1911]

Originally Posted by GasHouseGang

I would agree Greg. This panel is very odd. Have you ever seen any T205 uncut sheets or panels?

I wish! I love the gold borders.

For baseball there are a few Obak sheets and panels, but I believe this set was produced by an unrelated lithographer on the west coast. American Lithography was a lot more circumspect than the ATC was about a monopoly. A number of print shops are working with ALC and doing things that make no sense (one series of records I found in a card related court case has the ALC outsourcing a small project to 2 different 'independent' firms) if they didn't own a number of their 'competitors'. The documents suggest to me that the ALC didn't put on paper its ownership of firms like Brett Lithography that produced a number of the T card sets, but that in actual practice these firms were acting as subsidiaries.


I will edit this list if I am forgetting any, but I believe these are our surviving T sheets of the 1909-1912 ATC project. Finding even one panel or sheet of east coast printed T cards the same size as T205/6 could be very helpful.

Small Size Proof sheets, testing only a handful of cards, focused on colors and alignment and clearly not the size that would have been used for mass production:
T107
T62 (at least 2 different)
T51


Full size sheets or nearly full size sheets:
T212 Obaks

T25 - Auctioned and then cut up into strips and/or singles. (I have 2 strips of it).

T220 Silver - Proof cards cut into 8 panels long ago before 'discovery'. (I have 23 of the 24 surviving fragments).

E229 - cut into panels before discovery, from the same find as the T220 set. Candy set, but at least 1 of its backs is a licorice owned by the ATC and it was done by the same printers at the same place at the same time as T cards, probably using the same contracts, so I would bucket this as relevant, unlike the E90 sheets or the E93 sheet). These are probably proof cards, but there are no changes I have noticed. (I own most but not all of the panels).

T204 Ramly - cut up into singles that SGC slabbed, no picture or documentation was ever shown publicly (as far I am aware, I am no Ramly expert). These are probably not helpful to ATC card sheets.

T206 Panel - Cut up by Mastro in 1985. The presence of a single Wagner and Plank very strongly suggests this was not a "sheet" in the full sense, but a panel of some sort


The Wagner strip from his estate really doesn't fit with any. I would love to handle it raw and examine, but that ain't ever happening.


We would know a lot more than we do now about the ATC card project if we could find even a few sheets of random sets. That there are so few from any of the dozens of ATC sets and that some of those very few that did survive were not even documented before being destroyed saddens me. A lot of knowledge was lost, slowing research but perhaps preventing us from ever getting that information elsewhere. There may not be another sheet to discover and learn from, and we will forever be stuck squinting at miscuts and trying to deduce which cuts went with what sheet layout and its overall size etc.