Why I think Cobb wasn't printed with a Brown Hindu back

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Pat R

I highly doubt this Steve, it's clear American Lithograph was the biggest back then and it seemed they wanted everyone to know they were the biggest and the best They actually made a good pairing with the American Tobacco CO.

The numbers I came up with using the number of passes required and Scot Rs estimates on overall production combined with some info about the sheet rate of the flatbed presses worked out so that constant production would have been necessary just to get them all made. And that's also using a fairly large sheet size, and not counting anything but press time.

Running multiple presses would make it possible, but a big busy shop keeping at least two presses in constant production seems unusual.
The place I was at did a job that was a million 2 part deposit tickets for a big bank. Heat sealed into packs of I think a couple hundred. Two colors, so two passes through the press. With modern sheetfed rotary presses that still took a month plus. Upwards of 200 million cards with 9 passes. on a machine that maxed out around 1200 sheets an hour is somewhat crazy.

The description of Bretts rotary press says 10-12000 sheets a day, which seems low. It's possible they understated the speed to keep it sort of a trade secret. The Rubel rotary offset press which was built around the same time could do around 2500/hr making it about twice as fast.

The stamp on the back of the T220's indicates Brett was involved with those, either as a part of ALC, or as a subcontractor.
And that second ledger shows some very substantial quantities produced for other sets probably by someone else.

I've been thinking that instead of the masters being changed a couple times over the course of both the 150's and 350's the differences I've seen may be differences between printers. It's going to take a pretty major project to really get somewhere on just cataloging those differences.

I'm not sure if there's a way to tell if something came off a flatbed press or a rotary for an item like cards. With some other stuff the plates were made flat and bent to fit the cylinder in the press, which changed the image size.
But that may not have happened on a lithographic press. especially if the transfers were applied directly to a cylinder.
Another thing that would take some study, to see if some percentage of any particular subject had image size differences, which would be small, around half a millimeter if the rotary plate was fairly thick.