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Posted By: J Hull

I own a copy of the “Practical Text Book of Lithography,” published in 1912, which was basically a handbook for pressman apprentices. We have to keep in mind that lithography is a process based on the repulsion of grease and water. The plate used to apply ink to tobacco card stock was not itself engraved in any way. Instead there was a multi-step process by which an artist’s concept for a picture ended up as a series of lithographic printing plates, one for each color in the image. I haven’t read the book in a couple years, but glancing at it again tonight I found this sentence which pretty neatly lays it out: “It is found most practical for commercial lithography to first draw the design on paper, then engrave it in reverse on stone, and then transfer it to the printing plate by the use of transfer paper.” The transfer paper was specially treated to absorb greasy substances from the engraved stone and apply them to the smooth plate that was installed in the press. The plate in the press was then dampened with water, and it was the interplay of the ink with the water and grease portions of the transferred image that was used to create the picture on the cardboard stock.

From a practical standpoint what this means is that any changes to images or type needed to be done on the engraved stone itself, not the actual printing plate. I’ve long suspected that these engraved stones were small and consisted only of a single card’s image. This way they could be laid out in a grouping, transfer paper applied, and a sheet of cards produced. Then they could later be rearranged into a different grouping and a differently configured sheet would be produced. The cards on the different sheets would be identical, except insofar as the inks used could be slightly different or lighter or darker just based on the amount of ink adhering to the printing plates at any particular moment. Taking T206s as an example, the cards produced in the 150 series may have been grouped on sheets in one way, and then months later when printed again as 350 series cards could have been grouped entirely differently. This is one of the reasons, I strongly suspect, that it’s so difficult to try to figure out which cards came off of the same sheets. Practically, identical images could easily have come off of several different printing plates.

Jamie