What is the origin of Frank Thomas NNOF?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by West

Hey Steve,
Thank a lot for the response. Always like hearing from someone with printing experience.

The line (plate scratch) you are talking about - are you referring to the dark line below where the "F" in "Frank" should be? Nearly all the regular NNOFs have this scratch, if that helps at all.

Yes, that's probably a short plate scratch, or a flaw on the mask (A giant negative the plates were made from.) And it should be on almost all of them, if not actually all of them. It would be interesting to see a regular one with the same mark.

Originally Posted by West

You mentioned the number of impressions (population) of the NNOF. One person with 35+years in the printing industry said that the error was likely caught at the printers after 10 minutes. He speculated that this would have created 700-1000. He said that if it were a small number caught, say 100, then the sheets would have been pulled and sent to the bailer.

What is consistent with this count is the former Topps employee told me that QC pulled uncut sheets every 1000 or so to check for mistakes and print quality.

That sounds entirely plausible. We probably didn't pull sheets for QC as often as that, but we also weren't doing the sort of production Topps was - especially in 1990. Especially when I was on the press, although I did get almost up to speed with the regular guys.
What's especially good to know is that Topps was still using sheet fed presses, rather than web fed. (If the web press had a cutting station they still could pull sheets, so it's not 100% )

I'd be a bit surprised if Topps sent anything to the Baler in 1990. 87 through 91 there's so much out there for misprints. One Ebay dealer had a 5000 ct box of blank front/back cards, all from the same year.