Been off a few days, I'll have to put it differently.
Ron And Greg make some good points and questions.
I mostly agree with Rons points in post 5. Mostly.
And Leons and Chris points about the word "proof" being overused are 100% valid.
To me, there are different kinds of actual proofs.
The ones we can probably all agree on are ones produced to help create the images. These are generally like the ones Chris showed, and the unissued SLers .
The overall process of each company would produce those, as well as other "proofs". From what we've seen from the Topps vault, Topps had a really wide variety of proofing over the years. Probably related to needing licensing approval from multiple places.
And a lot of sheets got backdoored over the years, some obviously make-ready sheets.
Older companies didn't save stuff, or didn't have much opportunity to sell off their in-house pieces to anyone but scrap paper dealers. (who were often keen judges of value beyond scrap value, but cards at the time didn't have much value.
The process of older lithography compared to newer lithography is in some ways similar, in some ways not.
The art would have been done, then translated to individual colors, with some being halftones, and some being semi solid colors.
The proofs we know as proofs would have been printed from master stones laid out essentially by hand. (nearly every litho stone offered on Ebay is a master, the production stones were regularly resurfaced and reused. )
Each color and combination would have been examined and adjusted as needed to fix problems or to make it conform better to the original.
In some of the progressive proof books you can see this where there might be two blue pages with one having notes about what to change.
Once the exact design is approved transfers are printed from the master and laid out /transferred to the production stone.
So where do other proofs come in? Aren't the partially complete cards just that, incomplete stuff used to adjust the presses and occasionally taken home for the kid?
Perhaps, and in most cases, like the ones with multiple different backs or other items printed over the backs, that's obviously correct. As Ron said, anything faulty enough would simply be used to adjust the presses color and operation for the next run of whatever was next.
But, here's where I believe stuff like the yellow browns come in.
Knowing about how big the plates were, both with Gregs find of T-220s and Pats sheet reconstruction, Figure T206 at for a minimum 8 cards tall by 17 wide, that's 136 transfers that had to be transferred, maybe more. Times usually 8 different stones for the front.
That's a lot of labor just to prepare the stones.
So I'd be hard pressed to believe they didn't do test sheets to be sure the layout was correct, no problems like different spacing, or a crooked transfer, or putting a wrong transfer in one spot etc.
The easy way to check this is by printing progressive "proofs" directly from the production stones. (or plates)
Why do the backs? Simple, if layout guy 1 bases the layout from a baseline at the left, but the other guy does it from the right... the backs will not line up without a lot of work adjusting the press, if they ever do.
Printing brown and Yellow together would work great for that sort of progressive proof. Yellow is hard to see, especially if the plant isn't lit all that well. And you have to verify that those colors line up anyway.
This is where things get a bit hung up.
Those sheets used as "proofs" to determine if the stones were laid out properly would in nearly every case be pretty much impossible to tell apart from a normal production sheet. It's entirely probable that the other colors were tested on yellow sheets and in the correct order so they would have simply ended up as regular production. The ones that wouldn't really work would be the yellow/browns.
And that's why I prefer to think of those as "proofs". They were probably used that way, and were maybe put aside, or taken home for the kids, or for some reason saved by a scrap paper dealer. (Those guys saved so many rare stamp items they should get a medal or something. But then, by the early 1900s old envelopes with stamps had value while cards didn't)
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Modern version...
The place I worked at did all the pre press proofing photographically. and not usually in color the few I saw were sepia prints of the full sheet taken from the original art to assure the page layout was right and that stuff like the captions related to pictures were correct etc.
The job they did for me after I left there was no proofing at all. It was a very simple one color job done cheaply as a favor for me and the school dept.
We usually only did 5-10 make ready sheets, and since we had one plate maker and it was a photographic process, the plates needed very very little adjustment. Those first sheets for us were usually not on leftovers, and the ones on the handful of jobs I ran were all on new sheets put there for testing only. But they were printed, examined for faults, and registration and then later used for the next color.
The slightly more modern process was not labor intensive. If I'd needed a plate to replace one with a problem, it would have been ready in probably under a half hour. (If it even happened while I was there I never even heard about it. and given out company culture the plate guy or the guys in the stripping dept would have been given some good natured static over it until, someone else messed up or we got tired of it.
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