Posted By:
Joe D.barry,
any marks should be outside of the live art area.
but there are times that you may be limited in the size of the paper - and have to put marks in the live area .
the marks help you with lineup (colors)
In certain instances say when you print envelopes and the paper is already at the finished size (its an envelope), you would put the marks in the live area and then polish them out (basically erase them from the plate) when you have everything in fit. Or if for some reason you are running say a letterhead / and are starting with Letterhead sized paper.
So, I guess an explanation would be that these cards were run on a sheet just the right size... not big enough to support the crop marks and register marks. The register marks were put in the live area - and were polished out after they fit the colors. The marks probably were placed on four cards on the sheed (top middle / bottom middle / left middle / right middle)... but it could have been placed in fewer or more spots on the sheet (who knows?).
Normal process today would be to run enough sheets so that you can throw away the make-ready sheets (the sheets that had the mark in the live area before you fit the colors / polished out the marks / and proceeded with the print run). The extra sheets would allow you to have the quantity needed... but I guess the cards with the register marks (back in the early 1900s) were not thrown away or at least a bunch of them slipped through the cracks and made their way into distribution (and are now in SGC and PSA slabs).
Not knowing the history of the e-card printing / that would be my guess.
Edit to add: I still have my doubts that what I mention above explains the marks... mainly because these marks would appear in all of the colors, but in the cards shown - the marks are consistently just in the black ink. (possible that they didn't polish out the black marks for some reason... could be as simple as the pressman forgot to do the polish out on that particular plate - but did polish out the rest) Also, I am not sure I could envision putting marks that close to the top and bottom borders on the card (top/bottom of the horizontal cards)... it just seems you would risk polishing out part of the image area and may have to make a new plate. A nice open area would make for an easier polish out.