Friday, February 13, 2009

Vira Greeting Cards - a Page from the Character Merchandising Division Catalog for 1951

While preparing another post, I came across this page in the Character Merchandising Division catalog.

Some of you may recall the series I did on Vira greeting cards back in November of 2008. I had overlooked this page at the time because it was on the back of a page, and in this particular catalog almost all of the Alice merchandise is on the front of the page...that'll teach me.

This page is really interesting, and it illustrates very well something I have noted a couple of times before - what was planned for release and what was actually released don't necessarily coincide. Case in point, card number 410, in the above it is a Mad Hatter card; but in reality card 410 is an Alice card, as seen here. The other designs are all pretty close, although some of these renderings are in fact much nicer than the actual produced card.

Another interesting thing to note is that this page only mentions a single set of 6 cards, but in fact it appears as though they produced a set of 12 cards, a birthday and get well card in each of the 6 designs (although I have only seen 4 get well cards to date).

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