[Johnphotoman]

The printer had to have an original photo to print the Bond Bread cards. But how was this done? Only a small number of original photographs were used to print the Bond Bread cards. To produce the card they would use Photosats of the original photo. Why is this important to our investigation?

It all has to do with people calling many of the cards fake. Like the 1947 Square Bond Bread / Sports Star cards. Since they were a small number of the original photo, someone printing fake cards like these would not be able to produce the cards we have today, unless they had the original photo to do so. The only other way to print the cards would be a copy of a baseball card. Well not the only other way, but the others do not apply to this discussion, like photo-copies. And we know by using a printed baseball card, that would produce a moire pattern on it. No printer would be able to stop the patter of the moire, they could do a good job of hiding it, to make it look as good as possible, but not as good as the original. This can be done by changing the angle of the screen. But a moire would still be visible. With some practice even the less experienced person could still tell.

Therefore we can rule out the Festberg cards, the square corner cards as being forgeries or fakes. Mind you I am not saying these cards do not have forgeries, I have seen some myself. Even the grading companies miss this, I have seen cards that were graded and certified, that are obvious fakes, by some of the top grading companies. These same grading companies will not grade square corner cards anymore. What a joke.

What I am pointing out is to stop putting an umbrella over cards (calling them fakes) just because they do not fit into some category…like they have to be round cornered or printed on a certain kind of paper stock; just because someone says it was the only paper stock used for printing cards in the 1940s - 1950s. Or it is the paper used to print Bond Bread cards.

You want a fun exercise, take the time and go back to Ted Z thread, you will see a lot of fake cards posted as the real deal. But they are obviously fake cards. Comb the thread, you will be surprised as to how many fake cards you can spot now.

This one takes the cake for me, oh they are not fakes, but someone found the original printing plates and used them many years later to print cards. For a printer to have the original photo/ photosats or plates… many years later and use them to print from- is a million to one in my opinion. Having the exact same photo is just about out of the question, I can tell you from experience it would be very hard to save printing plates for over 20 years, so they can be used again.

When I said a million to one, the movie Dumb and Dumber came to mind. There was this line in the movie that went something like this: This guy asked a girl what's the chance of you and I getting together, she responded a million to one. What did he reply; oh so you're saying I still have a chance. Now of course that was not the exact line, I was paraphrasing. I hope you get my point.

Layout of the cards to be printed was done in a certain way, most of the time the cards would be laid out in a way to show cut marks on the layout, where the cards were to be cut, if the person cutting the cards missed the cut marks, you would then have the potential for different size cards and the images on the cards would appear to be in different position.

The layout and cutting of the cards explains why the exact same card can have the image on the card printed in what looks like a different position on the card. In other words, the image is not in the exact same position on the cards because they were cut wrong.

Therefore, for one to say a card is fake is all wrong, just because a card has a different position on a card, or a little smaller / bigger does not make it a fake, or that it was printed at some other time.

As far as the print quality goes you can not distinguish one card from another, or say it shows that a card was printed at another time. Just because one card is darker, lighter, faded or has more contrast, or spots on the cards. The printing process can count for such things during a run. The only quality we can look at…is to see if it is printed with a moire.

Images of cards cut wrong, card 1 top side, card 2 left side, card 3 right side of card. John