How to tell a Koester Bread from an E121 or W575?

[rhettyeakley]

Frank, at the expense of getting into another W575-1/Koester's debate I'll speak a little about the Brown card.

The Brown card was only ever produced as it was for Koester's (or potentially another company that wanted to do a similar promotion that we just don't have the surviving ads for). Thus EVERY Ed. Brown card will have his designation as Outf. as we was never produced by any other company for distribution, ie you will never find a Brown card with ANY type of advertising on the back. I can't confirm the data you provided about the Hoyt pointing in different directions as his E121 Series of 80 is pretty darn tough as he will only be found with the two "rare" backs in that series--you will not find Hoyt with the common E21 back.

Also, I wanted to point out that true W575-1's are WAY harder to find than I think anybody realizes. They are difficult to find, as usually when you find a blank backed W575-1 it has a Henry Johnson back stamp OR it is from the W575-1B set that we have spoken of before that is probably more correctly designated as W501 type 2 but since there is no G-4-22 on top people have resisted the attempt to designate them that way. I have actually found true W575-1's w/o the Henry Johnson backs to be especially tough to find and may actually be outnumberred in the overall population by the Koester's cards themselves as that was a fairly well distributed promotion.

Keep in mind that most W575-1's have the Henry Johnson stamp and those cards were distributed at the same time as the early print runs of the E121 cards so you will not find any of the late E121 series of 80 additions (which a lot of the rare backed E121's are) so you will not find a Hoyt with that back.

-Rhett