[Johnphotoman]

Report number 3
How baseball cards are printed;
The technology used to mechanically print realistic pictures on baseball cards did not exist for the most part until around the mid 1800s. Before the mid 1800s most pictures printed resembled hand drawn sketches, not photos. The invention of the Lithograph half-tone printing process changed all that. This new process allowed for magazines, newspapers and trading cards to have photorealistic images. Like the Bond Bread cards. Baseball cards were printed using a halftone technique that creates a gradient effect of ink by varying the size or spacing of dots: to trick the eye into seeing different shades.

The screen printing (half-tones) process was a complicated process. This new halftone process used a special screen to translate a photographic image into a pattern of fine dots on the printing plate. This fine dot pattern allowed for details that could not be achieved before. For a black and white picture, the dots are only black. For a color picture, the dots will be various colors, using - the four color printing process, cyan, magenta yellow and black.

The dots are only seen in the photo in black white printing, the text is solid ink, unless it had a shade of gray. Before half-tone printing, baseball cards were made using antiquated methods. 1800s cards have actual photographs pasted to cardboard backing. Cards like the Old Judges, Gypsy Queens, and others. Trading cards before the 1800s were handmade lithographs. By handmade I mean the designs were made directly onto the printing plate, a person would use special hand tools to put an image directly onto a printing plate. When you look at these cards they look a little like a color sketch or painting.

While the photograph itself has been around since 1839, it took decades before printers could print realistic reproductions of photographs. A black and white halftone image consists of a single screen. However, in four color process printing, four different screens are used. I will not get into all that, maybe some other time.

The reason it is important to know about half-tone printing, we can tell if it is an original card, or one copied from an already printed card.
This is done by looking at the dot pattern on the printed cards. When you copy a printed card the dots make a special pattern called a “moire” which will distort the accurate rendering of images. Below are two overlaid halftone grids showing a moire. In the above thread # 77 I gave a sample of a baseball card with a moire pattern on it , (Ted Williams) picture.

Now about the printing process and what - does it have to do with what I said about- “This could explain what looks to me some misunderstanding in the Ted Z thread.” There are samples of the back of cards given, that have what looks like dirt or specks on the back of cards, these cards are given as proof that these cards were inserted into loaves of Bond Bread, and because of how the backs look, saying it because of the bread why the cards look like they do. it also goes over the different stock, I will save that for later. No; this is just part of the printing process. It’s what in the trade is called set-off, or pick off. This happens for different reasons, the two main reasons are: the result of too much ink printed on the card, and the printing stack of printed cards were handled too soon, before the cards were totally dry.

The Aaron Robinson cards shown above, thread# 76, I gave an example of an extreme case of set-off. You can see the pick off on the front of the card.

The pictures below show a mild case of set-off; they are also the pictures used to show what the back of the cards look like that were supposedly inserted into Bond Bread. The bottom show two screens over each other that form a “moire”.