1926 Shotwell Set (Gridiron Greats Article)

[jefferyepayne]

Glad you like it, John. There was supposed to be a scan of the ad back in the article but it must have gotten cut due to space constraints. Here is one:



The album has text and photos in it. I'll try to scan some more pages of it after the National. It's a nice companion piece to snag!

My bet is that the W590 Grange strip card is his first card. We know these strip cards began production in 1925 but don't know for sure whether ALL of them were printed that year.

The Spaldings have a copyright of Nov 1926 on them so its unlikely the Grange in this set is the first. However since the Grange wasn't distributed with the set and was likely a sales sample, it probably was produced earlier in the year. A sheet of prototype / sample cards from 1925 came up for auction a while back so it looks like they were originally planning to release the set earlier than they did. No grange was on that sheet, though.

We know the Shotwell's were produced sometime after Alfred Shotwell and Grange agreed to a deal in Dec 1925. Since the movie "One Minute to Play" wasn't filmed until May/June of 1926, at least the Blank Back Shotwell's probably weren't released until the movie was released that Fall. No one knows for sure whether the ad backs were released before, at the same time, or after the blank backs.

Based on what I know, I'm going with:
Late '25/early '26 for the W590 Grange
Early '26 / mid year '26 for the Spalding Grange
Fall of '26 for the Shotwell Grange's

jeff

Originally Posted by DezHood

Just got to reading the new issue of GG and this was my favorite article - great job Jeff!

I really like that the article includes the history of the Shotwell company and lots of interesting non-card images like an ad display, 2 wrappers, and a box.

Some questions:

Can someone please post the reverse of one of the ad back cards, so we can see the ad?

Does anyone have the 11x14 photo?

There's a great image of the front cover of the album in the article, what's the rest of the album like? How many pages does it include? All photos or some text too?

For a collector who wanted the earliest Grange card (as opposed to the the 33 GSK "rookie"), we don't really know which one it is right? It could be the strip card or the Spalding or the Shotwell?