Waldorf Astoria medal pics

[Don D.]

I was going thru my book shelf because I was thinking about thinning it out and started leafing thru this book. They were (as I understand it) placed in the lobbies of hotels. Inside it are 287 cigarette card pictures of contemporary awards from WW1/Imperial era.

[Don D.]

Given the awards present and lack of TR bling these must have been from the 20s-early 30s.

[Don D.]

I decided to see if the pics might be good enough to ID makers. These EKs look vaguely familiar.

[Don D.]

Its also nice to see what a real WW1 Naval Wound Badge looked like.

[Don D.]

But what should we make of this?

[Don D.]

And this?

[Valter Gorenc]

Don, a very nice cigarette pics book. As far as I know, these books are collector's albums, in every pack of cigarettes there was one pic and if you smoked enough, you could collect them all.

But I don't think these pics are good for reference - they don't look like realistic photos, more likely paintings or highly retouched photos.

[gregM]

I've seen these books come up on ebay from time to time.
I have often thought about getting one.

Don,
I think that the Ek cards look a lot like the blued core
Zimmerman crosses.

The first that that caught my eye was the closed 4 in the date.
Also the "9" does not have any extra cure to it. Same as the
Zimmermans.

Another thing that I noticed was the somewhat pointy center to
the "Ws" There again, Zimmerman looks to have a narrower
center to the "W" as the generic Slant "W" core.

The cross on the second card has a crown that also looks some like
that of the Zimmermans (granted, it's hard to tell for sure) The first
card, the detail is not good enough to really make a guess.

Ok--let the fun begin

[Don D.]

Anyone else?

[streptile]

I think the PLMs could be Godet types (incl. "Schickles"), heavily reworked by an artist and then a colorist. Some catalogue images were made (I am convinced) by tracing a photo of a real award, which often rendered it totally unrecognizable. Add ink and color on top, and I guess you could end up with something like this from a Godet. The proportions seen consistent with Godets.

[Don D.]

How do these compare?

[streptile]

Very close, I'd say the one from the book is a photo that's been colored.

[Don D.]

Could be colored but its hard to say. The problem is with taking pics of the cards as they have a shiny surface. Still, they are very accurate in their depictions.

[Don D.]

Photo editting

The PLM eagles have their beaks. They were just hidden by the shine.

[Don D.]

and the wound badge detail is very sharp.