Question about Herpolsheimer's 1921 cards

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Posted By: Joann

But if it were a printer's proof set or whatever, why would the mark be on so many of them?

It seems bizarro to me - as in really crazy - that a single print run of only a very few sheets would have been stacked and left the mark. Far more likely for a single proof run that the sheets would have been laid side by side or something.

Plus, consider that if sheets were stacked while wet, wouldn't they almost HAVE to be sheets of the same images, run one after another quickly off the same plate and set-up, and stacked while wet? If they had to change plates between each sheet, wouldn't the previous sheet have dried in the meantime? Doesn't the fact that the braid is on all (or many) of the fronts provide extremely strong evidence that there were many more of these?

Logically, there is no way that if these were single sheets, the only ones ever run, they could have been wet-stacked. The only way possible would be if they had four presses set up side by side, each with a different plate running a different sheet, turned them on all at the same time and then took the printed sheets from the four different presses and put them in a single stack while all were still wet. That seems unlikely to me.

They may have run many of each sheet and picked the best one as the printer's proof, but then why would they have picked the ones with the bleed-through?

Somehow it seems to me that there had to be more cards. If so, they were pretty efficiently disposed of!

Joann