New theory why American Beauty cards are narrower than other T206's

[steve B]

Originally Posted by tedzan

OK guys...... FYI regarding the OBAK cards....and then hopefully, we can get back on the main track here talking
about T206 American Beauty cards.

The OBAK (T212) cards were printed in San Francisco at the Schmidt Lithography Co. Judging from the 76-card
uncut sheet shown in Post #8, Schmidt Lithography used a 30-inch wide press track to print 19 cards across the
sheet. This press track was considerably wider than American Litho's 18-inch press track used for the T206's.
For your edification regarding Schmidt Litho....check-out this link......
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/schmidt.html


Judson....thanks for the kind words and regarding your......" Frank W.'s point is well taken, but if the "stones" were
individual to the player images and assembled for each sheet, then that, to me, would be conclusive. If there were
miscut cards of the same player with different players to the left or right, that would be substantial proof that the
stones were secured individually onto the printing plates. "

Lithography is an art, and as Frank says the images are initially created on stones ("lithos"..Greek). Now, my under-
standing of this process is....then the image is transferred to metallic plates. So, adding a 13th image (or 26th, or
39th, etc., etc. onto a printing plate is no big deal.

Gee, I don't appear to be invoking any really thought-provoking stuff here. Let's do some serious thinking and arrive
at some plausible explanation for this series of "skinny" cards.


T-Rex TED

Lithography is either stones or plates. You wouldn't see both used.

The original image is converted to a film with a grid of dots, similar to any other halftone image. Alternately, a solid section of color can be printed.

Using stones was the older method, and is used mostly for art today.The stone is actually a nice thick piece of a special grade of limestone. The image is drawn on the stone with a water soluble material. Or printed on through a photographic process using a negative. The stone is waxed, and the water soluble part is washed off taking the image area wax with it. The stone is then etched with acid leaving depressions in the stone. In printing, the stone is wet on just the raised surface, and inked with an oil based ink. The ink sticks to the depressions, but not the damp stone. The paper is pressed onto the stone, making the printed item.

In offset lithography the image first gets printed to a rubber blanket that transfers the image to the paper.

In the modern version, which is nearly exclusively offset lithography the images are photographed with the screen which creates the dot pattern, and a film is generated. This film is attached to a mask which is used to expose the plates, which are then etched. Modern plates are usually aluminum with a thin limestone like coating. Once the plates are etched the printing process is pretty much the same, and almost always the offset style.

Very modern printing skips a lot of the preliminary steps, doing it al with computers. I'm not at all familiar with exactly how it's done.

Changing a stone to add an image would be a load of work. you'd either start with a fresh stone or more likely grind or etch the image off a used stone, and begin again from scratch. If there was room, you might just sneak an image into the border. Moving the row over to add a card would be pretty tough.

Changing a plate is also very difficult. I've seen scratches repaired by using a pencil like item that puts some surface back on the plate. And stuff can be added by scratching the plate. But wholesale changes would take a very long time, and the plate wouldn't last very long. So you'd want to make a whole new plate, which would require a new mask to be made.


On the good side, I believe they would use a new "negative" to make the new plate in either case, and by its nature it would have some difference from the earlier one. And Just today I got a card that I also have in another brand.
AB460 and soverign 460. I'll be making a nice detailed scan so I can compare the two in great detail.


Steve B