How Baseball Cards Were Made in the 19th Century

[Bpm0014]

Wow, great article!! Thanks!

[mouschi]

As always, thank you everyone!

Originally Posted by steve B

Great post!

They used as many colors as they needed, or as many as the customer would pay for. Many areas were patches of solid color. The dots similar to our modern halftones were done by hand, so the person doing that had a lot of control over the way it looked. Dark brown fading to light could be simply light brown with a tighter then looser pattern of dots that got smaller and farther apart. Or it could be Something similar over 2-4 patches of brown that get lighter.

You can usually pick out the colors looking with a good magnifier.

Most stuff I see was 6-8 colors, maybe a bit more or a bit less. (I sort of collect tradecards too) 45 would be a piece made to show off what the printer could do. Keeping that many colors all in registration was work for a real master. I don't think the art places still doing lithography that way even get close to that.

I am still in learning mode when it comes to all of this myself. I heard that the "stippling" was done by hand, but wonder ... wasn't all of it done by hand? Or perhaps they transfer to the stone and then do the stippling by hand on stone as opposed to relying upon the transfer. Any light you could shed on this for me would be appreciated! Also ... do you have any ideas how many stones may have been used for the A&G and Goodwin cards? I'd love to hear that as well!

Originally Posted by ejharrington

Thanks for sharing. I still have your website on Canseco on my cell phone. Every now and then I scroll through. 5,177 Canseco cards. Amazing!

Thanks! I scroll from time to time also Mainly I just have it up for a reference for everyone else, but I also go through it to see if there are any I'd like to try and get back. When I got back into it, I decided to do an entire base/base insert run and eventually got into picking up high end cards I wanted as well.

A couple weeks back, I decided to sell my base/base insert run, because I just never looked through them in the binders. I currently have about 250 Canseco cards (plus a binder of some base that someone gave me a few weeks ago that I keep in my closet) - but the 250 represents about 5% of what I used to have, but I am more satisfied with them now than I was when I had "everything". I can now really appreciate the special cards instead of always going after the next card I don't have.