1923 German Transfers Set and Checklist

Posted on October 5, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

‘It’s In The Details’

Title	German Transfers
Year	1923
Size	1 1/8″ x 1 1/2″
Images	Color
Type	Stamps
Number in Set	25

1923 German Transfers Overview

The 1923 German Transfers sheet includes a total of 25 subjects. The set is a multi-sport release containing both baseball players and boxing stars.

Despite the fact that these are mostly American subjects, the stamps clearly were not made here. We know that because the bottom of each stamp has the print, ‘Made in Germany.’ Hence, that is where the name is derived from.

These can be found separated with perforated edges or sometimes with the full sheet intact. A fully intact sheet includes five rows of five athletes and measures, roughly, 6″ x 8″.

Three players were repeated in the set – baseball players Zack Wheat and Red Faber, and also boxer Georges Carpentier. As a result, their stamps were double printed, although it doesn’t generally hurt their values with this set, which isn’t widely collected.

Also included on the sheet are big names Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Jack Dempsey, Grover Alexander, Tris Speaker, and more. Ruth and Cobb stamps generally sell for the most.

Athlete names on the transfers are, of course, reversed. This is so that they display properly when the transfer is affixed to something.

While the transfers are technically in color, the only ink colors used were red and green.

W515 Strip Card Link

Ty Cobb W515 Strip 23gs-cobb Of note is that, at least some of the stamps share images with those used in the W515 strip card set.

Both issues are dated to 1923, further linking the sets.

Shown here are the Ty Cobb transfer from this set as well as Cobb’s W515 strip card to show the similarity. The obvious difference is that the image on the transfer is reversed from the W515 strip card. As indicated above, that was obviously intentional to allow the transfer to be displayed facing the right way when applied to a surface.