Notched Sides
Notches along the sides of card mounted photographs are mostly a characteristic of Cabinet Cards, though a few CDVs, some of the late square and nearly square formats also have notches. Compared to cards of the same age in general, the notched cards seem to have square corners more frequently, though notched cards with rounded corners are also seen occasionally.
This report examines the temporal distribution and frequency of notches on the sides of card-mounted photos only. The phenomena resurfaced years later in certain commercially printed paper ’snapshot’ style photographs, and we will look at those another time.
Here we examine three types of notches, or perhaps four — we don’t have enough data yet to be sure if there is any benefit in distinguishing between two variant types, as we will describe in more detail below. As we will see, most notched cards also have gilt edges, though a small percentage did not — and that too has its own temporal distribution.