In October, I wrote about the four cards in the Imperial Lacrosse set belonging to lacrosse and hockey Hall of Famer Newsy Lalonde. Shortly afterwards, I heard from a collector about a Lalonde error card that has not yet been widely, if at all, catalogued.

Recapping briefly, Lalonde starred in both lacrosse and hockey,  Along with his C56 Imperial Hockey card from 1910-11, his 1910 C60 Imperial Lacrosse card is viewed as a rookie of the two-sport great.

Chris Cihon reached out to me on Twitter and indicated that he had an error card of Lalonde in the C60 set. The card was corrected and is not in any cataloging of the site that I have ever seen. To my knowledge, this is the first time the error card has been documented, let alone written about.

Pictured here are the fronts of the two cards. The Beckett graded version is the more common ‘corrected’ card. Other than minor ink differences (which are common in the orange and yellow background cards in the sets, the two are the same. The backs, however, tell a different story.

While the backs are mostly the same, there’s a notable error in Lalonde’s name.

The only version I’d seen previously is the one shortening his first name of Edouard to simply Ed. However, the error that Cihon found incorrectly lists Lalonde’s first name as ‘Edmond.’

While we don’t have any details about the printing of the two cards, at least two things immediately stand out.

First, the error card of ‘Edmond’ is clearly the tougher one to find. While I would expect there to be others, all C60 scans of Lalonde’s card that I have seen online have the shortened first name of Ed. Second, the error card would seemingly be the one printed first. Shortening his name to Ed after misspelling his name the first seems like the easiest fix and the most logical step. It makes little sense to change his name from Ed to Edmond, even if that was truly his first name. Finally, the error seems to have been found and corrected early in the process as there do not appear to be many examples of it.

One thing that sticks out on the two cards is that the typesetting on that line is completely different. The error card with his full name has the words closer to the border. On the presumably later-corrected version, the name is more towards the middle, as fewer characters were needed.

Imperial could have simply covered up the ‘mond’ on the error card for an easy fix. But that would have left a significant gap in between his first and last names. While the corrected card does still have a good amount of space in between, it would have been even worse if the letters were not completely reset.

It is possible, too, that more error cards in the set exist. Unfortunately, the Imperial Lacrosse sets are documented so little that such errors are not widely known.

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