I believe I finally got the last variety of the El Rancho Vegas Lion feature matches from Las Vegas. The scan is too large to upload, but you can see both sides of the six matches at:
http://home.comcast.net/~scan4/ElRanchoVegas6FeatureMB.jpg
Remember the reverse was taken by turning over the page on the scanner, so the reverses on the right go with the matches on the left on the page.
Some points to notice:
- The covers with the white horse and rider on the cover have the name of the hotel on every other match.
- There are two different brown insides for the books with the white horse.
- The white horse matches have the small size staples mandated by the War Production Board to save steel. So does one of the books advertising $4 rooms, but this book also has a version with standard wide staples. This might seem like a small difference, but one of the things you look for in these older scarce matches are books put together by dealers by restapling matches into an old cover. They almost always use the modern wide staple. The version of this book with wide staple is definitely original.
- The scarcest book in my experience is the one with the desert scene on the back. That's the last one I found.
Would like to hear from other collectors if they have still more versions of these features. There are, of course, other El Rancho Vegas books with similar covers and no printed matches inside.