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U.S. Planes & Warships
Purity Pretzel Company, United States

• Series Title: U.S. Planes & Warships
• American Card Catalog No.: D85
• Manufactured by: Purity Pretzel Company, Harrisburg, PA.
• Packaged With: Purity Pretzel Stix
• Number of Cards: 56K (unnumbered)
• Card Dimensions: 2.4" x 1.85" (nominal)
• Circa: early 1950's
• Checklist: download

Overview

The Purity Pretzel Company's U.S. Planes and Warships Series of collector cards is part of the "Bakery Cards" food issues. These series of cards were issued with bread and other various bakery products. Very few were issued on a national basis, most of the issuers being local concerns, which makes these cards especially difficult to collect. As a group, they're becoming more and more popular with collectors.

Burdick's 1960 "The Standard Guide on All Collected Cards in Their Values (a.k.a. The American Card Catalog)," notes that there are 105 cards in the Purity Pretzel U.S. Planes and Warships Series. We're not quite sure where Burdick came up with the 105 total since the cards themselves have no references to the total number of cards in the set. Nearly half a century later, only 56 titles have been found. In reality, The Purity Pretzel Company may have had grand plans for the series, but it appears that they were never realized.

When compared to the "Gum" cards, the overall quality of these cards are disappointing. It appears that the cards may have been printed by a local printer in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area. The dimensions of the cards are not consistent. We have therefore quoted "nominal" measured dimensions of 2.4" x 1.85". Other printing anomalies that we noted while scanning the cards were poorly placed top and bottom title blocks. In fact most of the title blocks were not parallel to the image area of the card, and in some cases the top and bottom title blocks were not parallel to each other. On one card, the bottom title block actually flowed out of the image area of the card. The trimming of the cards was also very disappointing. In many cases the trimmed edges of the cards are not parallel with the card's image area. There were also numerous misspellings on the cards, particularly on the airplane cards.

Be that as it may, the photos in this series include some interesting shots that we have not seen on other aviation cards. The series is comprised of three subsets: (1) U.S. Air Force Planes, (2) U.S. Navy planes, and (3) Ships of the U.S. Navy. One card from each of the subsets is shown below. All of the "Official" Photos were black and white. The reverse side of the card featured the Purity Stix baker boy and some advertising text. The American Card Catalog number for the set is D85.

Purity Pretzel U.S. Planes and Warships Series (D85) Image Guide

The fronts and Back of the 56 known Purity Pretzel Stix U.S. Planes & Warships is presented below. Behind each of the following thumbnails is a 600-dpi images that may be accessed by Skytamer Archive subscribers.

U. S. AIR FORCE SERIES

U. S. NAVY PLANES SERIES

U. S. NAVY SHIPS SERIES

U.S. Planes and Warships Checklist

We have included two versions of checklist: (1) the web version shown below, and (2) an Adobe® Acrobat® PDF 8-1/2" x 11" format checklist.

References and Credits

• Skytamer Images, Card scans from the Skytamer Images Collection