A cheap alternative for the T206 Demmitt St. Louis variation

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by atx840

It's possible they didnt have the updated PB plate (remaining card details minus NY) and had to use one of the two original NY plate layers for the remaining details to fill out the card and then used the St L plate.

Chris, that makes complete sense. It just seems odd to me, the way they must have stored/saved plates from the T206 set, to use for the Coupons. Really odd that they would save an early T206 plate, lose a newer one, and yet still have enough plates to create the cards they needed to include in the Coupon sets.

I don't have a checklist in front of me, but wondering if there are obvious omissions from the Coupon set that might be a result of losing T206 plates?

By the way, there are other Coupon cards that exhibit the same weird use of plates as the Demmitt. Your explanation above might explain some of the others I've found.

[steve B]

The plates wouldn't have been saved. Especially if they were printing from stones, those were commonly resurfaced and reused for whatever was next.

What would be saved would be the original halftones, which were most likely photographic negatives. And if there were any, the transfers used to layout the plates. Possibly the plates used to print the transfers, but that's less likely after four years.

It's possible they used some leftover NY transfers, or had only retained the NY halftones.

The point chris made about the underlaying NY being on two different colors is a good one. And it's probable that one showed the NY stronger than another. One thing that has struck me is that it seems the STL t206s are always a bit lighter in the uniform than other versions. So they may have used the weak halftone and further underexposed it to make the master plate for the PB version. Then later they didn't do this for the coupons.

The Rudolph is interesting, Obviously they had the T206 halftones still around 6 years later. But why? They had already taken a good deal of effort to remove the toronto from the jersey as much as 5 years earlier. You can see from the lack of shading that they did it the hard way for the TOR, but simply erased all the shading for the rest of the uniform. Maybe they were just lazy? Use up whatever transfers or use whatever halftone they found first and don't worry about the old team name?


There isn't really any white ink used. It's the color of the paper surface. It's most likely a coated stock using a surface coating that was mostly clay with maybe some white lead mixed in.

Steve B

[Runscott]

Steve, I thought 'half-tones' were only used for transferring the photographic image to a black-and-white image that could be used as the basis for the card's art. Given that the rest of it was hand-colored (wasn't it?), and the Coupon card art is generally almost a dead-perfect copy of the T206 art, how could they not have saved art other than the half-tones?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Runscott

Steve, I thought 'half-tones' were only used for transferring the photographic image to a black-and-white image that could be used as the basis for the card's art. Given that the rest of it was hand-colored (wasn't it?), and the Coupon card art is generally almost a dead-perfect copy of the T206 art, how could they not have saved art other than the half-tones?

Yeah, What I wrote could come across as confusing.

I was focused on the shaded player image rather than the entire multi color image.

Depending on the card they used halftones for at least one color, sometimes more than one. And not necessarily the same colors. Brown and gray/black are usually halftones, light red and blue are sometimes, the other colors are usually not.

So what I should have said is that the color separations would have been saved, probably as photographic negatives.
And that transfers of those might have been saved.

The original art was probably also saved, but there are enough examples of changes across the T206/T213 series that I feel fairly sure they didn't redo the color separtaions each time. Even the most obvious rework, the brown was probably just the same ones with the name and team removed.

It's somewhat odd, there are plenty of reworked T206s, and certainly some reworking between T206 and T213-2. But T213-3 shows lots of different approaches,
Rudolph, where it looks like they just used an old halftone.
others where it looks like they made new ones - Myers, where the underarm shading is yellow which isn't there at all on T206.
And ones like Street fielding where it looks like it's been entirely redone, but they left a shadow of the w on his uniform in blue- a color it wasn't done in T206.
And most look like they were either done from degraded color separations, or redone from 2nd or 3rd generation art.
Or possibly they combined a few and used fewer colors.

I don't have any type 3s to do any real comparisons, but I could compare the few type 2s I have to the T206s.

One thing that makes it hard to figure out is the number of elements.
Original photo -one probably saved
B+W Halftone -one Probably saved
Original art -Anywhere from one to 9 probably saved
halftones/negatives - 6-9 per card probably saved
Master stone 6-9 per card, maybe some saved? if they were with saved stuff yes, if not the stone would have been resurfaced.
Transfers 6-9 per card some probably saved. But only leftover extras.
production stones/plates. 6-9 per sheet probably not saved

So 21-30 different elements, with potentially just as many for some proofs, and occasional additional ones for the reworked subjects. (And another 5 or so for each back) And that's just from one job at a very large and busy printshop.

The place I was at saved original art when the customer didn't want it back, and the negative masks for I think 3 years or more. Except for when silver went crazy in 81 and many of the negatives were sent to a silver recycler.


Steve B

[Runscott]

Super post, Steve - thanks!