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HankronI decided it wouldn't fit well into the next newsletter, so here goes. I will stick to the highlights, as making a photoengraving takes a long and dry(er) explanation.
When a newspaper or magazine would receive a photograph from their photo distributor (such as ACME), they would decide how they wanted the photo cropped and what extra details were needed. They would often mark up the photograph to show how the image should be cropped and how the image should be changed. These markings are in crayon, pencil, silver ink, black ink and sometimes other colored in. They would then make a negative of this photo and this negative would be used to make the image on the printing plate.
In order to make the background white, they blocked out the to-be-white areas on the negative. They usualy did this with an ink that did not allow any light to go through. As with any negative used to make a picture, the dark areas (blocked out by ink in this case) appear as light in the photograph and the light areas appeared as dark. So by blocking out an area with opaque ink, the resultimage would apear as white.
Silver ink, on the other hand, was usually used for different purposes. If you ever see silver ink markings on a photograpic image, it would usually appear as black in the newspaper picture.
So the marks on your photograph were basically directions for whomever was making and preparing the negative. The marks tell how the image is supposed to be cropped and what areas are supposed to be blocked out so they utlimately appear as white. As you your self note, the '2 col' indicates that the picture was to appear in the newspaper as a 2 colum wide picture.