Printing and cutting method for 1941 Goudey R324?
 

Based on the black-and-white player images over plain color backgrounds, I assume Goudey printed its 33-card 1941 baseball set using a form of screen printing, with ink and paper quality limited by the expense of war-era materials. Once printed, the sheets appear to be hand cut (often misaligned or angled) by different staff than those involved in layout. Some cards were cut (wrongly) with names at the top, some with no names at all, and others (rightly) with names at the bottom.

I'm a novice in lithography and 1940s industrial techniques. Does anyone here know what printing approach their 1941 baseball set used?

Baseball: http://www.oldcardboard.com/r/r324/r324gal.asp

Its overall quality pales in comparison to Goudey's contemporaneous Sky Birds set, so could've been farmed out to different designers and printers, with baseball getting the worse option.

Sky Birds: http://www.skytamer.com/R137.html

1941 Goudeys have always been a fustercluck in the area of cuts. They remind me of E220 in that respect, all over the place. I agree, the pending war probably had something to do with it.

At least it had weak player selection. :eek:

Is that why they hired you to cut them? :D

No, I was too busy admiring DiMaggio's mediocre season, see Albert Belle thread. :D

It's reasonable to build a baseball sheets using 4 row by 6 column, 24-card layouts, as that's what Goudey used in their other 1941 set, Sky Birds. See the image below for one possible half-sheet arrangement that calls out a challenge of piecing 1941 Goudey miscuts into a sheet.

Most of these vertical and horizontal overlaps are verified across card pairs. (Mulcahy above another Mulcahy, McQuinn to right of Mulcahy, Chiozza to right of McQuinn, Rosar to right of Chiozza, Ambler to right of Rosar, and so on.) The problem's that a sheet with these 12 guys doesn't align well to graded population reports. A good arrangement would include known adjacent cards and match up at least somewhat to what's graded.

Based on card artifacts, I found location consistency for some numbers.

1. Mulcahy always at left edge of his sheet
2. Clift also always at left edge of his sheet
17. Tamulis often at right edge, might be in middle of sheet at others
32. Coffman always at right edge of his sheet
33. Ott sometimes at right edge, other times in middle of sheet

Some miscuts follow a similar theme, such as top edge cards cut with partial or missing names. This could've happened if a packager misunderstood where to cut the sheet itself and started horizontally, along the printed line. A higher percentage of players on the top or bottom edge of those sheets could've been discarded. (Some "missing name" cards ended up in packs anyway.)

TBD whether things can ever be nailed down for 41G. We might end up with assumed sheets that group players by graded population and known adjacent spots, with a number of caveats. Or we might end up throwing in the towel. :-)

The selection of players is fantastic despite the lack of any real Hall of Famers. Okay, so my gut feeling tis that Goudey was on the financial slide after 1936 and especially 1939 onward. I haven't been able to find the printing company yet, but I doubt it was the U.S. Litho Co. I'm pretty sure it was still a Boston-based printer, probably on Washington St, being printer's row near Chinatown. There was at last 6 companies on that street that were not household names and about a dozen more though out Boston.

America didn't enter the War when these were being issued, so paper and ink rationing wouldn't be the reason for the crappy factory cuts. Those factory cuts couldn't have been made by an experienced printer -no way! It's particularly why I think it was from a first-time small print company -and I also don't think these cards were issued outside Massachusetts because of 1) no copyright and 2) lack of distribution and 3) financial stability of the company.

Offset lithography would have been what was used, just like nearly every other set of that era. (And I say nearly, because if I say all, someone will point out a set that wasn't done that way. )


The lack of quality in the cutting has puzzled me too, even with equipment older than the 1930's, you almost have to deliberately mess up the cutting to do that poorly.

I think it's possible the printing was done by a printing company, but the cutting was done by Goudey themselves. The printing isn't bad at all, think how few you see that are out of register. I can't recall seeing any at all.


Cuts like what we see on the 41s do happen regularly when one of the scissor/office type paper cutters is used. Which could have been done at Goudey, but would have been really unlikely in a real print shop.

Thanks, getting cards cut inside Goudey by new hires or near-amateurs makes sense to me. Will add this all to the calculus.

1. No copyright and low overall count / distribution
2. Proximity of printers in Boston
3. No date on cards or wrapper