T206 Sheets

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Posted By: Mike

I hope I can help a little here.

I have been doing a lot of reading on the subject of chromolithograpy and its history and I will try to line out the process as I understand it as simply as possible. There are many things we will not know because we cannot travel back in time and see exactly what machines and process they used but with some research we can put together a pretty good picture.

The way many lithographed items were done was to do the work on smaller stones first. Today you can still find old stones with a single cigar label image on it. So the T206 cards may have been done in sets of say 6 or 12 on smaller stones. They were done this way when the print run was going to be very large and run over a long period of time. These stones were only used to make transfers from and to take proofs from. they were never used for the actual end product. when a job was complete these smaller stones with numbers identifying them were stored for use at a later date. It is much like today when we store a single digital image such as a business card with multiple Adobe InDesign layers in a file on the hard drive and duplicating it onto one large sheet when it comes time to print.

So for the T206 you would have a set of 6 images, six players, and for each set of six players there would be 9 separate stones, one for the key plate or stone. The Key is an outline drawing of the the original image it looks like a topographical map. The key also contains all of the crop marks for registry and and cutting purposes. In the case of the T206 cards the halftone image may have served double duty as the key. You would also have 8 separate stones for the colors yellow, light brown, buff, light blue, dark blue, pink, red and finally gray.

Now here is the key to all of this: transfer paper. Transfer paper was a form of paper with some type of gelatine coating. On google books you can find recipes and methods for making this kind of paper. It was also available premade at litho supplies houses. All of the big litho houses had tranfer departments with folks whose sole job it was to take transfers from the smaller stones and transfer them in multiples to the much larger stones that would run through the large steam presses. Modern printmakers will coat a sheet of paper with gum arabic and use that as transfer paper. Today you can also use photo copies and laser prints as transfers. You can draw directly onto the transfer paper with the usual litho inks and lay that onto a stone and run it through a press to transfer the image to the stone. There are books on google that mention James Mcneil Whistler the famous artist who made many prints actually doing his drawings on transfer paper and taking those to a master printer to have copies of his art made.

The way a transfer was done was to ink the small stone with black ink and apply the transfer paper to the stone which would then be run through a small dedicated press. You now have a piece of transfer paper which carries the image. You would now lay the transfer onto the large stone. This would be done with the same image multiple times using multiple images on the large stone so the image is repeated. The transfer paper is like a decal. It was wetted and the paper pulled off leaving just the ink image on the stone. The stone was now etched which is a whole other subject and I will not get into specifics. You can see the process on youtube and other places on the net. The large stone is now ready for printing.

For these cards you would have 9 different large stones with the multiple images, one for each color that needed to be in near perfect registration to one another.

In order to do a multiple color image a print of the large key plate would be made and varnished so as not to stretch. This large image was put on a sticking up plate. The transfers of each color taken from the small stones were then stuck up to this image using the crop marks to perfectly align the transfer sheets. The crop marks were then cut off. This large sticking up plate was laid down onto the large stone succsessfully sticking all of the transfers for that color to the large stone in perfect alignment to the key. The stone was now run through the press to transfer the images then the transfer paper was removed and the stone etched. This was repeated for each color on a different stone.

The jist of this is that you could probably identify the make up of the sets of images on the small stones but you would not be able to identify the makeup of a large sheet because the makeup of a large sheet could vary depending upon which job it was. Each time a job was started the smaller stones would be hauled out and transfered to the large sheet in what ever configuration was called for.That is why some cards have the same names top and bottom and sometimes they do not. It just depends on how the job was configured. The Images for the Wagner and Plank were probably never destroyed but when a transfer was pulled with their image it was probably just cut out and replaced with the transfers from another player.

I am fairly convinced that these were done on stone after reading a document on google books that states lithographers still used stones for special jobs such as those on harder paper like cardboard and when the image to be reproduced was a halftone image like that used on the T206 cards.


I am currently working on a web page that will lay out the process in detail, it will be heavily illustrated with images and diagrams. The page will also contain links to all the sites and documentation that I have found on the web.

If you did not understand a darn thing I said above a much better description of the processs can be found at this link below. I have read all the textbooks available for download and they are tough to read and understand. The article in this book is very well written in layman's terms and really made the whole thing click for me.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=bddAAAAAIAAJ&dq=the+building+of+a+book&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=w74m2LZcP3&sig=lCUJcvPQrbdesycEkaQf1800c_s&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA204,M1