1928 W565 Strip Card Set

 I recently picked up three 1928 W565 Strip Cards of boxing subjects.

The W565 set is a set of 50 subjects with fronts printed in either red or black with blank backs that are dark blue in color.  They are smaller than your average strip card at only 1" by 2" and were printed on sheets of 25 with five rows of five cards each.

There was one sheet printed in red and one sheet printed in black.  The black sheet includes the clubs and spades cards and the red sheet contains the hearts and diamonds.

The set includes a total of nine sports subjects with four baseball players (including Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Tony Lazzeri and Al Simmons) and five boxers.  The rest of the subjects are mostly made up of actors and actresses with the great Charlie Chaplin being the key actor.  Then there is a seemingly random inclusion of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit as well.  There are other subjects that make up the remaining cards in the set ranging from an aviator to a horse.

The actor and actress cards have playing card designs with each subject looking like a playing card with the image of the subject in the center of the card in a frame that is in the design of the suit of the card it is on.  Benny Leonard, one of the boxers, is also printed on a playing card as the four of clubs on the black sheet.  The other four boxers are not printed in a playing card design, they have an image of the boxer with his name and other info below the image.

W565 is not actually listed in the American Card Catalog (ACC) and the set name was not given to these cards by Jefferson Burdick, the author of the ACC and one of the, if not the most, important hobby pioneer in all of card collecting.  

For those who are counting, there are obviously only 40 playing cards which means a collector cannot complete a full set of playing cards as they would need 52 different cards to do so.  For some reason, the manufacturer of this set printed two cards twice with different subjects.  Causing even more cards to be missing than 12.  There are 14 missing cards to complete the full playing card deck. The breakdown of available cards is below as well as an image of the two sheets.

Clubs: (missing 3, 8, 10)

1. Ace
2. 2
3. 2 (w/ different subject)
4. 4
5. 5
6. 6
7. 7
8. 9
9. Jack
10. Queen
11. King
12. King (w/ different subject)

Spades: (missing 3, 7, 9, 10, King)

1. Ace
2. 2
3. 4
4. 5
5. 6
6. 8
7. Jack
8. Queen

Hearts: (missing 3, 5, Queen)

1. Ace
2. 2
3. 4
4. 6
5. 7
6. 8
7. 9
8. 10
9. Jack
10. King

Diamonds: (missing Ace, 3, Jack)

1. 2
2. 4
3. 5
4. 6
5. 7
6. 8
7. 9
8. 10
9. Queen
10. King

Image courtesy of OldCardboard.com

I recently picked up three of the five boxers and I'm searching for the other two.  They don't seem to come up very often so it might take me a little while to find them, but that's the best part of the hobby isn't it?  The hunt, the journey, the pursuit?  

Here are the three I picked up.

The other two boxers that I need are Benny Leonard and Young Stribling.  

I'd love to have one of the baseball subjects but they are usually out of my price range. Especially the Lou Gehrig card.  But I will be very happy to complete the five boxers subset of this issue.  

What do you all think about this set.  Do you like them, do you collect them, do you not like them?

Enjoy the hobby all...it's a great one!