T206 Font/Type Question

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Posted By: Dave Hornish

I have been thinking about this for a while now. It has been established (I think) that the caption at the bottom of the card was believed to have bee applied with the brown color pass. I have seen prior posts indicating some partial remnants on the Doyle NY Nat'l caption may have resulted from a printman wiping the plate and leaving a serif or period or something. Is it possible though the captions were added as separately typeset characters and not as part of the overall card design or brown printing pass.?

Plenty of sister sets to T206 use different fonts and colors for the captions whole using the same picture as T206, so to me this makes some sense. A T213 Coupon of a Cobb pose looks like a T206 except for the font and caption color. So I guess the question is could the caption be changed while leaving the card image itself unchanged? It certainly seems the answer is yes since a common group of plates of the images was used to make many different sets.

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Posted By: barrysloate

There are ghost printings known, with only white and yellow color such as the recently auctioned Hal Chase portrait, and those all had the names on the bottom. So it probably wasn't the last step.

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Posted By: Dave Hornish

Yes, but was it a separate step? From Barry's description it sounds like it could have been. Maybe the captions were set first?

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Posted By: barrysloate

Well every pass was likely a separate step. Just don't know which step included the bottom printing. Maybe Ted Z. could answer this better.

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Posted By: leon

Great question. I think the answer could be "yes" it could have been a seperate pass for the caption and the picture on the front....I am not a printing person so maybe one of our printing folks will help us out. Two passes certainly seems plausible to me...

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Posted By: davidcycleback

For many cards like this, the bottom text is often done from its own plate, sometimes simultaneously with a black border design. Even the black in the player image is done separately. I've seen old and modern color separation proof sets that showed this. Color separations show all the color combinations, and you see a point where it has all the colors except the black text, and a point where you see all the black printing but without the text-- showing the text was printed separately. The color separations don't show order of colors, but it's standard to print the light colors first and darkest last. No matter what the order, it would have been easy enough for the T206 printer to change the front text without changing anything else.

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Posted By: J Hull

One way, maybe, to answer this question is if anyone out there has any T206s where the brown ink layer is badly out of registration with the other colors. If the name/team designation line was printed from the same plate as that color layer it should be equally displaced top to bottom or side to side, as the case may be.

I think it's pretty well established that the name/team line is not black and was not printed with the black ink layer. I have a couple T206s where the black frame and black part of the player image are both displaced more than 1/16th of an inch from the rest of the image, so it's clear based on that that the frame was part of the black layer. On those cards the name line is not displaced. Now, if anyone has any cards like that where the brown ink is askew, we may have some insight about the name line.

Jamie

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Posted By: Joe D.

I would guess the text on the bottom was its own plate / along with the border.

The ink rotation may have gone from lightest to darkest.... I don't know the norms of the time and I am sure it has changed over the years.

I would like to point out - being a craft, a pressman or a shop foreman may have changed the rotation of the ink order if doing so might have offered a better printing result.

Also, from a business standpoint, if a print-job was on right before that one - it is understandable that the last color used on the prior job (ink still in the fountain) is the first color run on the next job (if possible).

This opens the possibility that the ink rotation varied.



Does anyone know if the T206s were printed on single color presses? or multi-color presses?
Admittedly I don't know the history of the machinery as well as I should.



edit to say:
btw - printing plates only have a certain usable amount of impressions they could make... and I would guess that number was much lower back then than it is today. So... I don't how often an opportunity a printer would have to save plates (considering how large the T206 run was) so that they could be used in other sets.

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Posted By: barrysloate

Joe- that's very interesting about the possibility of the ink rotation. It makes sense that if a certain color ink is in the press at the end of one run, there would be no reason to take it out for the next run only to replace it later.