Evolution of Beistle's Party Sets

I recently acquired this Beistle enveloped party set, complete with all contents. In examining it closely, I realized that I may have gained an insight into the evolution of Beistle’s efforts to create party sets. Their first effort was no doubt for the 1918 season. That example is shown on page 217, upper left. The enveloped Complete Party Outfit shown on the same page at the upper right was attributed to 1922. I know now this is an error. (In reading the marketing verbiage more carefully in a copy of a 1921 Beistle catalog for retail shop owners, it clearly states that that enveloped set enjoyed great sales in the two previous seasons - 1919 and 1920. They continued to offer this set for the 1921 season, too. I have updated the book’s errata page.) I believe now that the enveloped set shown below was offered for the 1922 season only. It represents the earliest evidence of Beistle’s fairy motif mania that reached full bloom the following year. The set shown below, also shown in Campanelli’s great reference on page 112, has larger invitations, nut cups and fortune place cards than one sees starting with the 1923 effort. The 1922 iteration also included a fortune puzzle that was quickly dropped, not to be included in any party set going forward. Now, we all know that Beistle scored a home run with their party sets that first appeared in 1923. Their first iteration was a boxed set with slightly different verbiage from the sets much more commonly seen. That first iteration lasted for perhaps a month, and is truly rare. Once Beistle settled on the final cover verbiage and adopted what would become a smaller but standard sizing for the invitations, nut cups and fortune place cards, they pumped out significant quantities of the 1923 party set in three forms: boxed, enveloped and in the form of a booklet, which itself had two iterations - one with white pages and one with orange pages. Interesting, huh?