T206 Claude Ritchey & The Doves

[jimonym]

Tim, the Legendary P150 Ritchey that you've posted raises an interesting set of possibilities.

In the REA Piedmont Plank thread I tried to explain a bit about how T206 printing plates were probably created (check out mkdltn's excellent posts as well). I won't post all of that again, but in a thumbnail, based on commercial lithographic processes circa 1910, it was a very simple procedure to create a production printing plate that included more than one copy of the same card -- hence the vertical column layout that seems to have predominated. The same processes also would have made it very simple to have any particular card be printed from multiple production plates. So for example, Claude Ritchey may have been printed from 2 or 3 or 4 or more printing plates, each having different configurations of cards but all containing Claude Ritchey or a column of Claude Ritcheys.

I've come to believe that most T206s appeared on more than one printing plate in exactly this way. Many folks on this board are trying to figure out front-back combinations of T206 cards and are looking for correspondences between brands -- Ted several times has shown us his great sets of American Beauty, Broad Leaf, Carolina Brights, and Drum cards all having the same player on the front. But to some extent all of us who are interested in these correspondences are knocking our heads against a wall. There just aren't many clean rules of the kind that say, well, if a 350 series card can be found with EPDG, then it can also be found with Old Mill and Tolstoi. If cards only appeared on one printing plate, we'd see more of these kind of rules with regard to brand distribution. That we do not see that makes me believe that most T206s were indeed printed from multiple printing plates.

To circle back to Ritchey, the variations in Dark Blue ink and "doves" and grass may not just be because of variations in ink levels with one printing plate. The variations may also be across several printing plates that included Ritchey, and across series (150 and 350) and the timeline of production. That there's a Piedmont 150 Ritchey with strong "doves" and plenty of Piedmont 150 Ritcheys with no doves at all seems to me to support this multiple plate theory.