Doyle NY Nat'l and Doyle Ny with same mark on back
 

Looks like when they removed the Nat'l it stayed in the same place on the
sheet.

A change like the Doyle is very easy to do. There's a special limestone crayon that can be used to fix stuff like scratches, and it would easily remove a section of text. I've believed that the Doyle was fixed that way since I saw the ones with traces of the N still showing.


Steve B

Limestone crayon on a stone printing plate?

I believe that the OP was referring to the positioning on the original 'printing plate.' I too, thought he was inferring that two cards were the same, one altered, the other not. Clear as mud? Perfect.

Yes. The stones used when it was actually stones were limestone, and the process basically put a substance on the plate that was oil based. The limestone holds enough water to repel the ink while the other stuff holds the oily ink. So to remove something from what would print, just cover it with a bit of limestone. (Actually more like wear it off and fill the etched area it was in with limestone )

Modern plates are aluminum with a limestoneish coating. So the crayon works just as well.

And adding stuff to what prints is possible by scratching the plate. on modern plates the coating is gone and ink sticks to the aluminum. On stones, the scratch has to be a bit deeper, so it fills with ink.

Steve B

What the two cards show is that both the corrected version and the uncorrected one were in the same position on the sheet. So either they made a whole new brown plate to fix the mistake or stoned the nat'l off. The second is the simplest explanation.

The mark on the back will be on every card from the same position on a Piedmont sheet as long as it was produced after the mark got on the plate. Since the error has it it was probably there from the start.

What's cool/important about that is that there will be other players with the same mark. And that means they would be from a different front layout.

Pat has done a tremendous amount of work spotting and documenting these marks.

Steve B

Thanks for the compliment Steve. The scans came out to small here to show
the marks clear but the Pelaez and Conlon NY Nat'l Doyle's both have this
exact mark as well as a small % of the corrected Doyle's with good enough
scans to tell. If members check their Piedmont 350 Doyle's some should
find this mark on them.

Patrick