as far as I know, print shops that do general work have a variety of press sizes.
The tiny place I was at had three, a small one that did regular 10 1/2x11 or smaller paper, one that did 24inch paper and two that did 35 inch. Later a 35inch two color press was added.

What press was used was a matter of what was being done and how many.

A couple thousand business cards went on the little press, a thousand book covers showing a fighter jet in full color for a recruiting place went on the 24, and a huge order for multi part bank deposit slips went on the 35.

The larger presses aren't and as far as I know weren't limited to large paper sizes. So the 35" presses could easily run the 24" stuff, or the business cards.
I'm sure there was a formula but the area they never had me help in was the business end. (There were formulas I learned for machining in tech school, and it seems like very similar ones would work well for printing. )

But...

With the quantities of cards in general we've learned were printed, I can't imagine them being done on a small press.

Do you know anything about the speed of presses in 1910? From what I can find, it was notable when a new press was installed at one of these lithographers, and sometimes we can see claimed speed rates from the press makers or lithographers. In 1916, Brett purchased one that could do over 2,500 sheets an hour at 45x65 inches. I can't find yet a record closer to late 1910. Sounds like it would have been less than this per press per hour.

A press that could spit out 2,500 sheets an hour would produce ~25,000 sheets a day. With 200 silver border cards a day, that's 5,000,000 cards in one day, from one press.

If it was, in late 1910, say, 1,000 sheets an hour, that would still be 10,000 sheets of 200 cards each - 2,000,000 cards in one day from one press. And this is for T220, one of the physically largest of the T sets. T206 size sets would fit far more cards if they were on sheets near this size.

Well less than 2,000,000 silver border cards were probably produced. I doubt more than ~5,000 exist today, and that would be a very high estimate.

I had thought they wouldn't be nearly this efficient. We've talked a lot about the huge scale of the T card production and how all evidence is that it greatly exceeds what people think, and that the survival rate is much lower than people generally think.

I think the figure I saw for the 1910 era flatbed presses was around 800 sheets and hour.
There's a reason the rotaries killed off the flatbed presses so quickly.

The ones we had I think could run about 4000 sheets/hour.

The new ones.... 15000/hour up to 21,000/hr!

And remember, they were doing around 8 colors plus the backs, and there had to be some drying time in between, so figure about a week and a half from blank to finished cards IF they used multiple presses because I can't imagine changing the stone on a flatbed that size was a quick task.

ALC and Hoe were pretty close, Hoe had some rotary typeset presses that were multi color and fed from a roll of material. I have to really organize my thoughts and write them up, but there's a bit of evidence that a 2 color press was used. Which is really interesting because supposedly the first rotary offset litho press was invented in 1910.

Hoe wrote a book mostly self serving in 1902 covering the history of presses, mostly the ones made for typography and newspapers. Those were much faster.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6354...-h/63545-h.htm

I think the majority of the T206's were printed on large sheets just like the one you have assembled with your T220 panels. I say majority because I think it's possible that some smaller sheets were printed at other facility's with ties to ALC.

We have pretty solid evidence of the minimum width of the sheets with one of the plate scratch sheets that has 24 cards in a horizontal row.

I think they changed the layouts but kept the sheet size when that got to the the last two smaller print groups (3 and 4).

The backs these test print scraps show a minimum of 17 cards in a horizontal row and it could easily also be 24 if the "exclusive 12" were double printed horizontally to fit the sheet and that would explain why the two different Pfeffer's have different subjects on the backs.

Attachment 561764

Thank you for this.

The scale of the operation outside the direct orienting seems like it would be the larger pain. The need (and massive space) to dry all these sheets, to process through the cutting machine, and then to pack the single cards (I'd be fairly surprised if there was much collation work - people buying packs to get the cards must have been awfully frustrated with getting the same ~25 subjects all the time over and over) and to ship them out must have taken a lot of people in 1910.

Looking at the non-sport ATC sets of the T205/T206 physical dimensions, 25 would across would make perfect sense. 50 card sets and 25 card waves are indicated as a standard size. Unlike T206, I have not come across one of these non-sport cards in that size that has a different subject showing above or below on a miscut card. What I expect to find and what we do find are often very different, but demonstrating 24 across at least makes perfect sense.

Edward Hett invented a multi color rotary sheet press in 1899 and he sold his invention to American Lithograph.

Attachment 562118


Here's the thread I posted about his invention and sale to ALC.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...ighlight=Press

Damn, I must be getting old and forgetting stuff.

What's interesting is that most online histories of printing and lithography still don't mention Hett at all, but attribute the first rotary press with plates to someone else in (assuming I'm remembering it right) 1910.

I do wonder if Hetts press was built, or how and if it worked. I can see some potential problems, but there were rotary presses in newspaper work well before that. Just not lithographic presses.

That's surprising because it's mentioned in 100's of newspapers from 1899 until his death in 1915 and although he is credited with other inventions the multi-color press is the one thing mentioned in his obituaries. The $300,000 that he received from American Lithograph in 1900 is equivalent to more than 10.5 million dollars today.

Attachment 562304

Attachment 562305

I think it may be just the searches I've been doing.
Hetts press apparently prints directly from the cylinders, and I've been looking at offset presses, which are credited to Rubel just after 1900. Invented 1901, and in production by 1905.
https://www.si.edu/es/object/nmah_882246

Multi color offset presses are basically just two or more of those strung together with a common feed and output. And in some ways hadn't changed much into the 1980's.

I've been reading some of his patents, and they're very interesting. The printing cylinders were a copper tube with a cast zinc surface that could be used for several other types of printing. The patent I read didn't specifically mention lithography, but an article about it did. That use may be in a different patent, and the surface may have been something other than zinc, as I can't picture that being a good material for water retention. But who knows? I may have to experiment, zinc plates are used for etching and zinc plated plates for corrosion resistance, and they're not expensive.

More interesting to me but not at all applicable to cards, is that it looks like different types of printing may have been possible on the same machine.

Hyland's contract that never mentions tobacco at all seems to indicate rights were secured for more than just the primary purpose. It is certainly no accident that the verbiage gives permission for any and all use of his picture to the lithographers, not to the tobacco concern.

That the E229 sheets were found with the T220 Silver sheets strongly suggests that there is a printing relationship and these are probably a Brett production; it would be difficult to argue it is more likely that the unique production material just happened to come together into the same spot from what appears to be the items of a non-collector. The checklist is studded with athletes known to have given their rights to the tobacco cards. It is, as far as I am aware, impossible to know if these panels were for E229 or D353, but the cards are the same and probably produced at about the same time. One would deduce, from the discovery, that this is a late 1910 or early 1911 set, and the checklist strongly suggests a 1908-1912 timeframe.

First, here's some of their material from the period of the cards and the product.

In late 1910, National Licorice seems to have significantly upped their marketing, as I can't find much on the Y&S product line from the card backs. Here's a pair of ads, from December 1910. One shows their Y&S licorice gum; this ad with nothing but a picture of the box was run throughout 1910. The packages look to me smaller than would comfortably fit the cards, but there's no scale here. Some of these ads also ran in German language US publications, like "apotheker-zeitung", which looks like a catalogue of apothecaries.

This 1911 ad from the Spatula has some more detail into their marketing verbiage and medicinal focus.

A 1913 ad from the Pacific Pharmacist from Wm. DuVal & Co. was their west coast distributor, and their product had a wide range of geographic sale. West coast distributors, marketing to minority group publications, seems to have been sizable operation. There are numerous other ads from the 1910's easily found for their Y&S product line.

So we have the company, we have the panels, we have the deductive probability that these were printed alongside the tobacco cards and used the same permission letters used for T218. Earlier, though, we have deduced that their must have been an exclusive element to the T card agreement between American Lithography and it's probably-but-still-not-proven-beyond-doubt shadow subsidiaries, and the ATC and its subsidiaries. If there had not been an exclusive element, then there's no reason Knapp and team wouldn't have produced card images for other products, as it quickly spawned a fad and numerous small operations in the 1909-1912 timeframe started putting out their own, generally lower quality, card issues.

Either one of the deductions must be false, or National Licorice must be owned by the ATC. So I went searching.

National Licorice was a subsidiary of the American Tobacco Company. A November, 1907 issue of The Tobacco Worker contains much discussion of government action against the ATC, the case for the monopoly, and the companies involved. I will link rather than screen cap as there is much else here of interest for researchers beyond a single page, it goes into detail about the takeover of Bollman, the structure of the monopoly, and more. The part pertaining to National Licorice is on page 14 of the issue (page 305 in the pdf file of the compilation book here: https://books.googleusercontent.com/...KkC61ZBE6AH1-O.

It states that the Continental Company, which we have discussed in other threads as an ATC front, purchased the MacAndrews & Forbes firm, created a new firm of that name in New Jersey, and consumed the old firm as well as Mellor & Rittenhouse. Of the $3,000,000 worth of voting shares, the ATC owned $2,112,000. This company went into the business of importing licorice root and paste and selling licorice products. In 1902, MacAndrews & Forbes bought the Stamford Manufacturing Companies root and paste business, and Stamford agreed not to compete in that area of business.

In 1902, MacAndrews & Forbes (Owned by Continental, owned by American Tobacco) founded the National Licorice Company, which bought the businesses of Young & Smylie and F.B. & V.P. Scudder. Frederick Scudder seems to have been managing part of the company after the acquisition. National Licorice, their subsidiary, agreed "not to manufacture licorice paste to be used in tobacco products", i.e. a different subsidiary would be doing that part.

It is noted that two competitors were left by the end of 1902, and that the ATC's subsidiaries began to sell paste far under cost to drive them out of business.

So licorice's components were apparently used in tobacco, and licorice was dominated by the ATC as a result. The E229's were produced by the monopoly for a subsidiary firm (3 times removed from them), and thus the American Lithographic partners could and did produce cards for them.

This leaves D353. D353 is identical to E229, except for the different back. Attached is an example, E229 on the left and D353 on the right. These Koester Bread cards are more difficult than E229, which I wouldn't call easy.

Koester's cards must be:
1) Again, one of the previous deductions is wrong or

2) The cards are not from 1910-1911 but a few years later, a reprinting after the fall of the tobacco monopoly, like T214, T215, etc. by which time whatever agreement they had had with Duke wasn't an issue, or

3) Koester's was owned by an ATC owned firm or

4) The cards are a pirated issue, and somehow someone else stole the images and made cards with them.

I can find numerous ads and records of Koesters Bread in Baltimore in the mid teens and the early 1920's (they issued base ball pictures in 1921), they seem to have continued on for decades after this. According to a coupon they were founded in 1886. Not finding much in the 1910-1911 period yet.

I haven't found anything on the D353's but here's a June 1916 ad for D1 cards and albums.

Attachment 562723

While flipping through my cards this morning, it occurs that another deduction can be made.

The attached Coburn (scan stolen from previous owner) is from the proofing stage or a scrapped sheet. It is from very, very early in white border production, if it is not from the proofing stage. We know this because of the man at left. In the silver series, the man is fully drawn. Coburn is one of two cards with artistic changes; a small minority of Coburn's in early white border production (Mecca factory 649 only - Tolstoi was likely printed at some remove from the Mecca run; it was issued in March of 1911) have the man at left as a blue silhouette, like it is here on this card.

The upside down wrong back features Gans. An upside down wrong back isn't random. For it to happen, the sheet must be put in upside down, which means that the card on the front will dictate what card constitutes the wrong back that is upside down. A card on the left edge of the sheet won't have an upside down wrong back of a card from the middle of the sheet; it will be the card in the corresponding slot on the right side of the sheet.

Now that we know 92% of the sheet layout, we can see if this early white border production matches the silver sheet. It should be noted that, while I am quite confident I have the panels arranged correctly, it is possible final production was different. This is not the only T220 Silver proof sheet that would have been run; we can be sure it wasn't the last as they haven't tested the backs, the silver borders, and they corrected the error on Willie Beecher's card before they started actual production. The production sheet is probably the same layout, as it would take labor to 0 gain to redesign it, but this is a deduction and not a proven 100% fact. Some changes are very possible to have been made shortly after production began. Whether Corbett and Donovan were removed and replaced on the sheet with other cards (almost certainly not full panels of 8 DP'd), left as blanks, or printed and manually cut out/removed is a mystery to me.

Coburn is in the middle rows on the left edge. Gans is on the middle rows on the right edge. This sheet layout matches this upside wrong back (the only one I am aware of in this set) from the white borders. It is of course possible that this is mere coincidence, but it is statistically unlikely. The white borders were very probably produced using this same layout, on 2 sheets of 25 with the second sheet featuring the 25 new pictures and art style that was not present in the original wave. Wave printing and issue seems to have been how a lot of 50 card series were done; usually not so obvious because 1) they didn't change the borders and 2) we don't have uncut sheets of them but their are hints in how certain backs are only available in half of a series sometimes.

National Licorice, after the breakup of the ATC, ended up going into the tobacco business themselves directly. This ad is from 1924.

At a penny a pack I suspect those are candy cigarettes.

That makes more sense. I didn’t know candy cigarettes was a thing until right now

Well, they were, were sort of popular in the 70's, but basically got put out of production because the were "teaching kids to smoke"

The sheet layout is now finally complete. The appearance of the Ryan sheet settles the two bottom corners. Technically, 10 slots remain unaccounted for. It seems so obvious that the bottom left 8 must be McAuliffe and that the 2 cards missing here are both Tommy Ryan. The white borders of the Ryan make it's placement in the layout simple; there is more of the brown tape on the back and it's cutting perfectly matches the adjacent panels to the left and above.

This panel never appeared, on eBay or via Weiss, alongside the rest of the panels. I am happily proven wrong when I said it probably did not survive. As expected though it is heavily damaged. The second Ryan in the top row has an incompletely printed "T", and some of the wood flooring is also marred by a print defect that seems related. The bottom left Ryan card has a green spot on his shoulder. Both of these defects were corrected before production runs.

Seller was kind enough to take extra time he didn't need to take to talk about them. Putting together what I've learned before, it appears that the root source of this sheet is a collector of paper ephemera who has unfortunately passed away recently. I suspect this collector is the cutter of the sheet, and that it survived quite some time without being cut into the panels.

I would think that there would have been several sheets run, aligning and testing color, etc. The cards on these sheets are nearly complete but some small changes were made before final production began (The Beecher spelling error being the most obvious one). It is difficult for me to capture in pictures limited to 1mb in size on here, but the panels appear to my eyes to be a higher quality print than any production card I have seen; the colors a little deeper and richer than any of the production cards. I would think it fairly safe to assume there was probably at least 1 more proof test sheet run after this one; to correct the little things that were changed. I would suspect there are several more test runs to do the backs and to apply the borders that seem to be awfully complicated. This is definitely a proof stage sheet, based on the incomplete nature of the captions and the stamping on back.

The sheet as it stands today, with measurements. The missing Choyinski panel has the white border at left and very clearly is below Coburn, so we know there is not more to the left, and the actual measurement will be slightly greater horizontally than I can show here.

The panels are very slightly curved, and I don't press them together side by side exactly so as not to damage corners; measurements won't be 100% exact from this, but to show the scale.

And the sheet recreated as best I can, with production singles filling in Choyinski (extant and confirmed in that slot, but owned by someone else) and McAuliffe (unknown to exist, I doubt that it does anymore).

That's wonderful. Even beat it belongs with the rest of the sheet.

I finally had a close look at the image size, and did a bit of math for other sets. For T206 sized cards, going on what looks like a 50x33 inch printed area the two different layouts work out to 34x12 cards if they're vertical and 19x22 if theyre horizontal.

The 34x12 fits fewer cards, but matches pretty much perfectly with the groupings, which almost always come out to 12 or 17/34.

I won't take it for granted that there is 1 sheet size for a particular issue, especially issues for which there is some deductive indications of multiple facility printing and printed over long stretches of time (T220 is probably 5-6 months with at least 3 distinct print periods in that timeframe) like T206. 34 and 12 fits a lot of the patterns and a larger sheet is more efficient from a production perspective.

One oddity here (or odd to me, as a printing novice) is the lack of extra border on the cards on the margin. On the sheets the cards measure correct on the ends, so that if there was even 1mm of miscutting the tan border would be replaced with white. I imagine in production more of the sheet margins were smeared with the silver layer to hide this, as we never see a silver border card with any hint of white cardstock on the front at an edge.

I pickup T miscuts etc. whenever possible but miscuts only take us so far in reconstructing. Different sets have different oddities, like some of the T218's being printed upside down, the smaller size cards being done in mostly vertical repeating arrangements. Can deduce a T42 (same size as T206) sheet has 25 different subjects, but who knows how many rows or if there are DP's involved to do that, it doesn't mean 25 rows across.

It's a shame that so little uncut material survives, and most of what did has been destroyed before being documented (like the alleged T206 panel Wagner and Plank came from, the T204 sheet, etc.). The T25 partial sheets above were also destroyed (I have 2 of the lower grade strips that were apparently the rejects from trimming them up) but thankfully documented first. Maybe the next find will be a T206 sheet and we can do better than make deductions. What we learn from them is often cooler than the material itself.

I want to correct some false assumptions I had earlier and then forgot to come update until reaching this part of editing my notes.

T225-1 is in the Fullgraff record book, with some mostly uncut proofs glued into the book. Fullgraff and his employer, Brett Lithography, the printers of this silver sheet, are the person and company who Dick Hyland signed the rights of his image use, pursuant to the NY law. The record book tells us production was between February and May of 1910 in 3 different product runs (possibly more; the records may not be complete and only encompass one facility). So we know T225-1 is printed by Brett, and we have the contract for one of the subjects permitting it.

One thing that has long been noted as odd is that the Ball letter is made out by American Lithographic, the source for the long-standing hobby belief that ALC printed all the T cards at their NY headquarters (not true).

The Hyland contract, unlike the letter to Ball (it's not the contract itself, just a letter connected with it), makes no mention of what his image is to be used for or tobacco at all. It is made out to the lithographer, not the actual issuer. This is rather odd; typically a company using a persons image in marketing material pays that person or secures their permission and then has whoever does their printing make it.

The reason for this seems to be because images were desired to be used for multiple clients. T225-1 is not an ATC release; Khedievial is firmly independent. While some firms appear to operate independently but the records suggest are shadow subsidiaries of a Monopoly in the Sherman era, the ATC was busy suing Khedivial for rolling oval cigarettes that violated a patent from 1908-1910, their executives cited Khedivial as a top competitor, and nothing I have ever been able to find suggests that Khedivial was a shadow subsidiary. Hyland's rights were given to the lithographer so they could sell his image to the Khedivial/Surbrug Co. (T225) and to the ATC (T218/T226). This did not happen often in T card land; there are very few T sets that are not done for the ATC, but even the same printers did at least some of those cards. It seems to have been the purpose though. As we have seen from E229, it may bleed into more caramel cards of the period as well that followed the exact same timeline.

It is possible T225-2 has so many obscure and insignificant subjects because someone at the ATC didn't like this and, as the much larger client, changed how the contracts worked or pressured their friends at the ALC and it's semi-independent subsidiaries, an ally of the ATC. Just a theory for the italicized portion.

It's been over a year, but I think I have finally made some very small progress on the mystery of the Donovan/J. Corbett short printing while reviewing the Dingley Tariff and the long-standing theory that the cards are short-printed because there was some kind of prize associated with the set, like some Gum card sets and others did.

The primary import of this tariff act is that it banned tobacco cards entirely in 1897. In 1902 it was amended by Congress to only ban those that were "immoral" - this is why the 19th century tobacco card focus on provocative images of women are about the only topic T cards stayed away from - because it was illegal to insert them.

Because I am an idiot, I only just realized that the verbiage in the act regulating coupons and prizes seems to relate to this SP problem in T220-1. The 1902 amendment also lightens regulations of coupons and prizes, but it stipulates that, in addition to the prize not being "immoral" either, shall not include in tobacco packages "any paper, certificate or instrument purporting to represent a ticket, chance, share, or interest in, or dependent upon, the event of a lottery." A short printed card inserted randomly for a winner to pull and redeem, by itself or with a set, would seem to fall under the meaning of a lottery at that time, a card as an instrument used as a chance to win a lottery. As the ATC was quite careful not to openly violate direct laws and give the government even more opportunities to come after them, I think this explanation can now be dismissed positively.

Perhaps one day a source will appear that gives us the answer as to why these two were short-printed. It looks like we can dismiss the insert/prize explanation, leaving us with the fact that the proofing stage had them printed in equal quantity as the other cards, alongside evidence that Donovan knew the man who produced the set and was anti-tobacco, but really nothing else. Not a lot to work with still. But it's something at least.

Just a thought Greg but after they were printed a lot of the Donovan and Corbett cards could have been separated for some kind of promotion. I'm sure you know it was common to give out photo's/cards at movies, fights and other events back then. I'm not sure if there would have been a lower survival rate or not or possibly a lot of them were never given out and didn't survive.

It very well may be. I would think, at the remove of over a century :D, that handouts for an event like the T206 Cobb with Cobb story, would be printed on their own to avoid having a worker have to sift through the massive post-cutting stacks, but not everything is efficient. I have this on my list of possibilities but have yet to find any evidence for/against.

Are there other example of the ATC 1909-1912 cards being used like this? I am familiar with the Cobb with Cobb - I don't think I am aware of another but you know far, far more than I do and it would be interesting to learn. I would think it probable that salesmen/representatives/executives would sometimes hand out regular cards without special differences like SP's or the Cobbie's, but my guesses don't mean much.

In all likelihood I will never find the proof on these, the T226 Red Sun SP's, the T227 Brown/Rodgers, but the 'pulled' or extremely short printed cards and why is one of my favorite areas of the T cards. It is such a fun mystery, even if I never learn the answer from someone or some source.

Would anyone with a better eye than me be willing to take a crack at what it says in the bottom left corner?

This is a page from Fullgraff's personal book, from the original sale. It looks like a name has been written in the bottom left, which might be of immense value to set research if it could bee discerned and I had somebody to track down in the archives. My AI tools are not able to read it - the quality is what it is, I don't have a higher resolution available unfortunately.

Thank you.