Lightening rarely strikes twice and we are extremely pleased to be offering a second N172 Brooklyn “Mini” card in this auction. This N172 card (pose 349-1) of Jack O’Brien is a fabulous example of high-image quality and a rare variation. There are 48 regular Brooklyn poses known which accounts for 2 full sheets. However to date there have been less than half of this number verified. A Brooklyn “Mini” is a normal sized Old Judge card with the image of the player cropped smaller and having a much larger border around the image. To understand how they were created we have to look at the production of the Old Judge cards themselves. Goodwin took cabinet photos of the players and cropped them down to a smaller size (still larger than the cards) and placed them in a grid of four rows with six cards in each row. Then they added a mat (a die-cut board which framed the images) to the grid and placed the name plates Old Judge banner ads and copyright lines to the images. From there they would take another photo of the entire grid and when they delevoped that photo they had an uncut sheet of cards. When you look at a normal 1887 N172 you can see the shadows under the mat that was added to the grid. All Old Judge cards depicted players that were photographed in a studio in front of a background. However the photographer taking the Brooklyn photos took the photos outside and when he did so he took them from a farther distance away from the player than those taken in studio settings. So when Goodwin was preparing the grid for the Brooklyn cards they decided to crop the photos a little tigher than the rest of the cards so the players would still be the same size on the finished card. Then they took the photo of the completed grid at a closer distance to create the same size uncut sheet as the non-Brooklyn sheets. By doing this they could create normal looking Brooklyn cards. The differences were that the Old Judge banner ad and the name plates appeared larger on the Brooklyn cards because they were being photographed from closer than on the other cards. The copyright line looked about the same because they used a smaller copyright cutout. Goodwin didn't always print sheets in just team composites. They often printed