What is this Gehrig item?

[spec]

Originally Posted by steve B

That's what I was thinking. It being cardboard made me think newer, I'd be surprised if a decent block would be had from melted lead going into cardboard. Some presses used rubber plates, but I don't know when that started.

Possible, I just looked it up and the rubber plate process was around from about 1900.

Steve B

I believe Steve and Matty have nailed this. It looks like a portion of the stereotype that was used to make printing plates for rotary presses at major newspapers at least into the 1970s. As a longtime newspaperman, I remember sadly that the stereotypers were the first department rendered obsolete when the Boston papers adopted new technologies beginning sometime soon after 1972 (when the Record-American purchased the Herald-Traveler).As such, I'd call this piece ephemera, since it was intended to be thrown away or recycled.