Quote:
Originally Posted by tedzan
Yes, we know that American Litho (ALC) had varying sizes of printing presses. Big ones, medium size ones, and smaller size presses. However, it is my understanding that ALC
realized, with their 6-7 color process used to print these tobacco cards, they were able to achieve a higher YIELD of quality by printing them on smaller sheets. And, YIELD was
a very important factor when you are cranking out 10's of Millions of cards in a short time span.
Steve, do you agree with the above premise ?
And, while it's a mystery to me that we haven't discovered any uncut sheets (or partially uncut panels) of T206's, I've seen several uncut sheets of various Non-Sports issues
produced by ALC. One (or two) were printed on a 19" x 24" sheet; and, others were printed on smaller size sheets.
TED Z
|
Not quite. They would get higher yield from larger sheets. The press can only make so many impressions an hour back then typically 800-1000 for a sheet fed press.
The web presses could run much faster, but I haven't found any indication that they were for lithography. The aluminum plates came out around 1900, so it's certainly possible.
Balancing quality, speed, and costs from setup time etc is the challenge. Quality is mostly up to the operator, but running faster makes it much harder.
One thing all of us neglect is the possibility of very large sheets laid out in blocks that could be based on 12 or 17 subjects. Or multiple sheet arrangements - So printing both sheets that were 17 (Maybe more) Subjects AND at the same time printing sheets that were 12 subjects.
I haven't seen the uncut non-sports cards, different sizes makes sense since many of those sets were 50-100 cards. If you have any links to them I think they'd be very interesting.
It is odd that no uncut production baseball cards are known, when there are sheets or partial sheets of other stuff. Odder still is that the progressive proof books for cigar box labels are readily available, but I've never seen one for any card. That's probably a matter of what got saved.
Steve B