old or newer griswold griddle

Confused as usual. I think I will travel with my BB and RB now every time I go out looking for CI. Just too may variations for my newbe brain.

I thought this was an old griswold griddle because of the slant logo, but on page 55 of the BB there is a griddle from 1957 that looks the same except for:
p/n 758
initials of employees

My griddle is p/n 738

Also, I've seen that ERIE is usually in quotes on an older skillet/griddle. Mine does not have quotes, so I'm guessing this is a newer 1950s griddle.

What do you think?
Thanks,
Mark

The one with all the initials was allegedly made as the last piece cast in Erie, PA in 1957, but it doesn't mean the pattern used was necessarily being used for then-current production. Quotes around ERIE only appear to matter on skillet dating. I'd say yours is more like ~ 1920.

I' trying to learn, so please understand my next question.

How do you know ~1920? I can understand some things in dating CI when I look in the BB or RB and see a change in numbering, or part numbering, or handle design, or sometimes thickness/weight, or labeling, ...

But with this thing, it looks like the 1957 design on the back, doesn't have the same part number, has the part number of the older ones, but not the reinforcement or label,...
I look at it and see a craftsman coming in on a Monday morning after a hard weekend and thinking "Lets just have some fun messing around with future collectors heads".

Are there other books that would help?

Thanks for your patience and your willingness to spread your knowledge. It is much appreciated. The same to all the others that have helped too.

758 is the p/n for a#4 wood handle skillet, so maybe the photo makes it look like 758 not 738. The TMs used progressed from "ERIE" to the Slant TM w/Erie to the Slant TM w/EPU to the Large Block (LBL) TM w/EPU to the Small Block TM w/ Erie, PA. Although there were no distinct year transition points for these changes, and the changes were not made all at once when they were, we can estimate a "Slant Erie" piece to have been made somewhere around the end of the just "ERIE" period which spanned ~ 1890-1910 on up thru about 1915-1920.

Added: Looking at the BB, I would say all the adding of the initials, which would have been done by impressing them in the sand mold after the pattern was removed, resulted in the 3 in the p/n, which would have been raised sand, being physically deformed into something able to be mistaken for a 5.

A personal comment here: the finish on the griddle surface says "old" to me. Good luck, ME, and keep at it, you'll pick things up as you go along.