Show...me...your print variations!

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Cliff Bowman

I couldn’t agree more, in my opinion the 61 Fairly green in ball is the worst vintage postwar variation that PSA recognized, with the 57 Bakep being the next. They recognized the 73 Earl Williams border gaps for a short time but then wisely stopped it. Hopefully they stopped recognizing the 73 Bahnsen and 73 Bell single border gaps as well.

I think some of them were recognized early on by the handful of people that were into variations. The Bakep and herrer were both in Ralph Nozakis book in 1975. And they're uncommon enough that I hadn't seen one until sometime after I joined here (Didn't look all that hard after a while)

When something is that uncommon, and it's listed during a time when there isn't ready access to images, I think most people take it on faith - Like I did, because hey, the guy wrote a book listing loads of variations, he must really be an expert!


The Fairly is just weird, because it got recognized at a time when images are readily available and sharable. I haven't yet seen a 61 with green in the ball that I'd think of as being anything but over inking or registration. (I do think they're possible, I've found a couple differences where the color under the back print is actually different. )

I'm more comfortable with the missing black cards, and the border gaps, as in most cases it's at least somewhat clear that the plate was either made differently or had a defect.
If the definition is intentionally changed, that works for me for variations, and maybe use varieties for plate differences that weren't intentional.
That's also a bit fuzzy, as an example, 88 Score has three different die cuts used to separate the sheet. And the changes were intentional as it was done in response to customer complaints. BUT they are also screened differently for one press run than another. Intentional? they probably happened when the errors were fixed, so to some extent intentional. But I don't think the person doing the new halftones was like "It will look better if I put the red at 30 degrees instead of 45" Likely the camera was set up that way that day, and they just didn't consider it to be important.
Lots of sets from that era have similar things going on.