Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnphotoman
Thank you Steve B - You make very good points. You are right, it is not impossible to make good forgeries. The point I was making is I believe we can rule out the Festburg cards as forgeries, or re-prints from the original plates sometime in the 1970-1980s. Yes you are right a plate can be used over and over, most shops did save their offset plates, but to save one for over 29 years, would be hard. Remember we are talking about Printing from 1947, much different than what we have today. And I cannot say how the cards where actually printed 100%. But the odds are they where printed through offset printing. Thanks John PS. I refer you to KeyMan Collectibles about photo stats.
https://keymancollectibles.com/photo...insonphoto.htm |
The process matters.
Offset lithography with the thin aluminum plates - those plates were rarely saved. We piled them up, used them for dustpans, support for bondo on cars, patches for sheds... then when the pile got to be big enough what was left nearly all of them, went to the scrap guy.
How the 1962 Topps plates survived is amazing. I knew the story once but have forgotten.
The other offset - from print blocks or type used very durable "plates" and those would have been saved. Like these, and a couple hockey ones I have
Reprinting from these would be easy.
The way keyman is using photostat is not familiar to me. Photostat was an early term for photocopy from a photocopy machine using the process still used today that uses static electricity to get the toner to stick on the paper.
That's the Xerox process.
Looking it up, the photostat process directly exposed a roll of paper then developed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photostat_machine
What they describe is a part of the process of creating the original art to photograph. I guess it's possible they could have photocopied the signature onto a transparency, but with a full print shops resources at hand that would have been doing it the hard way.
Photographing the signature to make a film transparency that would become part of the mask would have been easy.