The Mullin has a scratch from upper left to lower right. That's part of a different group from the ones Pat has put together so far. That other one I think also has a vertical scratch or two.
While the Scientific American article showed Hoe #5 presses at ALC when they electrified, there's no evidence I've seen indicating any particular press used for any particular job. That includes the existing progressive proof books for cigar box labels.
Like any large shop ALC most likely had a variety of presses that would be used depending on how many of something were to be printed.
The scratches can show certain things, but not others. They can show that two cards were likely side by side on the sheet. That there's two cards showing the same scratch limits that to a possibility of 2, but at the same time, if one shows the scratch and another shows the same scratch they can be positively ruled out as being from the same sheet. Combined with a front mark like the one Pat showed recently they can show cards as being from the same sheet. It's hardly arbitrary.
There are a few things that need more research.
ALC was close to Hoe in a business sense, Hoe made a lot of different sorts of presses around 1910. Including both the flatbed presses like the #5, rotary presses that used plates rather than stones, web fed presses that printed not sheets but rolls of paper or cardstock, and multi color presses. There is some evidence that some but probably not all T206s were printed on a two color press.
There's a lot of evidence that most of the series were printed at least three times, and that subjects were reworked between printings as well as between series. 150's were done at least three times, and were altered before the 350 series, which was printed at least twice with a reworking in between for many subjects.
And among all that is the possibility (Almost certainty) that there were multiple sheet layouts for each series AND each back. That's especially true for the 150's where there's a handful of outliers that don't match up with a simple layout of single sheets. (Crawford wasn't in the Sovereign set but was in all the others. I can't imagine he was printed but pulled)
The scratches - at least one of them was deep enough to carry over into P350. Whether it was deep enough to survive resurfacing or the 150 stone with the scratch was altered to produce a 350 stone without having all new transfers laid down is a puzzle for the future.
At least one P150 back shows a doubling, either a poorly erased earlier layout or a redone misplaced transfer (Criger - Any others?)
So the simple solution of a sheet always being the same size really doesn't work.
Steve B
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02-07-2016, 01:49 PM
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