1952 Topps Baseball - Perspectives

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Republicaninmass

Steveb could elaborate, but I think just fixing the small errors would be easier than retaking the whole sheet (photo?). That being said, I think they may have had to change the whole sheet to add the yellow on the pale yellow (no green throat) house card.

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It would depend on the error, and where in the process it hapened.

Errors on the original art would require reshooting at least one color to make a corrected mask.

Errors on the mask might be easily fixed, might not. Most are, but would require making a new plate for that color.

Errors that happened in platemaking would just require making a new plate. Or if it was super simple like a random spot it could just be stoned off the plate.


Most of the 1952 varieties seem like small stuff that slipped in while the plates were being made. It's fairly well known that they were done on 100 card sheets. What's not really known is if for say the first series 1-80 they did multiple sheets with different layouts, or if it was 80 plus 20 double prints.
The errors in that series are major, and probably from the mask being wrong, so they at least had to redo that for all four colors.

The gray backs are a 60 card series, so the simplest layout would be 60 plus 40 double prints, leaving 20 more difficult ones.
Unless they had a reason to play around with which ones were tougher, I can't see a reason to make new masks. That would be a fairly substantial expense.
Depending on timing, they probably made new plates, and errors that happen in that process would be different.

[Zach Wheat]

Originally Posted by steve B

It would depend on the error, and where in the process it hapened.

Errors on the original art would require reshooting at least one color to make a corrected mask.

Errors on the mask might be easily fixed, might not. Most are, but would require making a new plate for that color.

Errors that happened in platemaking would just require making a new plate. Or if it was super simple like a random spot it could just be stoned off the plate.


Most of the 1952 varieties seem like small stuff that slipped in while the plates were being made. It's fairly well known that they were done on 100 card sheets. What's not really known is if for say the first series 1-80 they did multiple sheets with different layouts, or if it was 80 plus 20 double prints.
The errors in that series are major, and probably from the mask being wrong, so they at least had to redo that for all four colors.

The gray backs are a 60 card series, so the simplest layout would be 60 plus 40 double prints, leaving 20 more difficult ones.
Unless they had a reason to play around with which ones were tougher, I can't see a reason to make new masks. That would be a fairly substantial expense.
Depending on timing, they probably made new plates, and errors that happen in that process would be different.

Steve,

Do you have any insight into whether a job like pre-production salesmen's samples would be shopped out to a smaller printer or whether Topps would print these in-house? The reason I ask is that the '52 Topps salesmen samples appear to be printed on the same gray paper stock and appear to have the most common type of fronts as most gray backs (dull grayish/brown hue).

I have always thought that the reason for different paper types i.e gray backs was due to contracting out a portion of the printing to another source, due to higher than anticipated demand.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Zach Wheat

Steve,

Do you have any insight into whether a job like pre-production salesmen's samples would be shopped out to a smaller printer or whether Topps would print these in-house? The reason I ask is that the '52 Topps salesmen samples appear to be printed on the same gray paper stock and appear to have the most common type of fronts as most gray backs (dull grayish/brown hue).

I have always thought that contracting out a portion of the printing to another source, due to higher than anticipated demand was the reason for the different paper types.

It's possible. We can be fairly sure they did it a decade later because of the green tints, But by then they probably farmed out a portion of the production.
Some random pros/cons

If it wasn't so early, I'd think it was. But promotional stuff should have been done early to generate pre sales for series 1. So promos should be pre-demand. And doing them on cheaper stock makes some financial sense. Not much need to farm them out.

If I recall it right, the 51s come on two different stocks. That would be from two different runs, which seems backed up by the variations in the redbacks.
Different places? Or just different times?

I'm not sure what proofing Topps did early, but they were doing all sorts of proofing by the mid 60's. If their capacity was essentially the same, they would have had plenty of time to do promo stuff alongside the other sets and products they were printing for.