1954 Bowman counterfeit method?

[G1911]

Originally Posted by ElJayel

Well that is quite unexpected. Thanks for your insight! A few questions if you don't mind.

I don't know anything about how cards were printed in the 50s. How would a sheet accidentally get flipped? And would that mean that all the cards on that one sheet would be misprinted? If this happened more than once would it mean all the Larsen misprints would have the same Seminick back? How rare are 1954 Bowman wrong backs like this?

Thanks!

Yes, if a sheet was flipped then all the cards on that exact sheet would be printed together with an upside down wrong back. The 1954 Bowman sheet layouts are not fully known, but for example let's say that Don Larsen is the top left corner card of the sheet, row 1 column 1. To create a wrong back, if that sheet is then run through to print the reverses, the bottom right corner card will be the top of the sheet printed in that slot.

I am not quite sure of the press details in 1954, if a feeder machine automated flipping the sheet over or if a human worker sat there and did it over and over all day. Dave might know better and chime in. This happens throughout the entirety of cardboard history - I have an ~1860's CDV that has the front text printed upside down from the lithographers back, and you can still on rare occasion find them today in a fresh pack of Topps. It was even a somewhat frequently recurring issue with 2021 Topps Heritage High Number, as I recall.

All the Larsen wrong backs created like this would have a Seminick back, as the wrong back is dictated by being of whatever card is in the exact opposite position on the sheet. Wrong backs are, much less often, created in other ways. For example, a front sheet from a second series paired with a first series back sheet that was laying around the factory, often happening during pre-production testing.

1954 Bowman is not especially prone to this problem, but I have seen others. An exact card found this way, like a 1954 Larsen wrong back, is quite rare. You might look for an exact card with a wrong back and never find it in decades of searching.



Please forgive my example of a boxing card, but as this is what I have handy on my hard drive and the 1954 Bowman sheet layout is not fully known, here's an example of how it happens.

This Coburn has Gans printed upside down on the back. This happened because the sheet was run upside down. As we know the layout here, we can see that Coburn is in rows 5 and 6 on the left edge of the sheet, so if it was run upside down for the back printing it would be rows 5 and 6 from the opposite right end of the sheet that would be printed on his reverse. Sure enough, that's what happened here. It also illustrates why these are pretty rare - this card is clearly handcut, from a scrapped sheet that wasn't issued because it was caught in quality control. Two mistakes have to be made - a machine or worker has to flip the sheet incorrectly, and then the mistake has to be unnoticed for the card to slip into a pack and be issued.