2. Dixie Lid Find Suggests Eight Short-Printed Players

A recently-surfaced partial sheet of 1953 Dixie Lid baseball players provides new details about the set and how it was produced. It also suggests that lids for eight of the players in the 24-player series may have been short printed, or produced in one-half the quantities of the other players.

The sheet (pictured at right) was brought to our attention by Lew Lipset, who will be selling it in his Spring 2012 auction ending April 5.

According to Lipset, the consignor discovered the sheet in a warehouse in Brooklyn some years ago along with a similar but larger sheet for the 1953 Dixie Lid non-sport set and other items. The consignor indicated that the sheets had been used as shades to cover windows in the warehouse.

As shown, the partial sheet contains 72 baseball players in six rows of twelve players each. It measures 28-1/2 inches wide by 14-1/2 inches tall.

Although the partial sheets for both the baseball and the non-sports sets have been trimmed, it can be determined from the patterns of both sheets that they were originally printed in a 16-row by 20-column format. Interestingly, the arrangement of subjects on both sheets repeats in the same pattern, with some subjects repeated more than others. The non-baseball sheet is somewhat larger with all sixteen rows intact along with 17-1/2 of the twenty columns. The nearly complete sheet (showing all or parts of 288 out of 320 lids) measures 39-1/2 by 41 inches.

The arrangement of subjects for both sheets is detailed in the chart below. The location on the sheet is indicated for all twenty-four subjects in each of the 1953 Dixie Lid sets--both baseball and non-sports.

As can be seen by referring to the chart, the subjects repeat every four rows. Sixteen of the twenty-four subjects in each set are printed in the first four columns, then again in columns 5 through 8, 11 through 14 and 17 through 20, respectively. However, different players are printed in columns 9 and 10, then again in columns 15 and 16.

As a result, players in columns nine, ten, fifteen and sixteen are printed in only half the quantity as those in the other columns. They are therefore "short printed" in a 1 to 2 ratio. The eight players in these columns are Sid Gordon, Bob Lemon, Nelson Fox, Ted Kluszewski, Richie Ashburn, Gene Woodling, Chico Carrasquel and Mel Parnell.

Prior to the discovery, neither Lipset nor any of the longtime Dixie Lid collectors that we contacted were aware that some of the players in the set were more or less scarce than others. There also seems to be little or no difference in the values of cards within the set based on apparent differences in the quantities printed.

It should be noted that the above partial sheet of 72 cards is different in format than the full 24-card sheet of 1953 Dixie Lids described in the Editor's Notebook section of Issue #6 (Winter 2006) of Old Cardboard magazine. That is because the 1953 Dixie Lid set was produced in two lid sizes: one measuring 2-1/4 inches in diameter and the other measuring 2-11/16 inches in diameter. The partial sheet described above contains lids of the smaller of the two sizes. The 24-card sheet pictured in the magazine features lids of the larger size. Both sheets are extremely rare and are likely the only examples that remain from the fifty-eight year old issue.