1933 Goudey - colors

[Bigdaddy]

I'm mostly a post-war collector but have been dabbling in some of the pre-war issues lately. One question I have is concerning the background colors on many of the 1933 Goudey cards. For the same player, some examples have bright colors for the background and others are dull or washed out. An example is the Rick Ferrell card - you can find it with a dark brownish-red background or a very washed out/faded background. It also shows up on the Ruth #144 quite often also.

My question is: Were these differences in color an artifact of the printing and released that way from the factory in 1933, or are they just showing the effects of Father Time with some copies fading more than others depending on environmental conditions?

[chadeast]

Having just (nearly) finished collecting the set, and being a stickler for colors, I'll share my 2c. First off, I suspect that the two cards you have shown are a lot closer in color than those photos would lead you to believe. You can see how much lighter the PSA slab looks in the one with the "lighter" brown background. Even the black on the label in the washed out photo is more of a gray. This is one of the big challenges in buying Goudeys online, variation in scanner settings and/or photos. I've been pleasantly surprised with cards that looked washed out online, and I've been saddened to receive cards that looked like they had great color but were faded when I received them.

That being said, yes, there is a big variation in actual colors as well. This has been perhaps my biggest challenge in collecting the set, getting cards with strong vivid colors. Some cards look factory fresh with amazing color (I love those!), others have some fading that seems reasonable considering their age, and yet others appear to be either badly faded or soaked in some chemical that has bleached out the color. I can't say for sure whether or not these are factory issues, but given the very wide range in colors that I've seen, I believe that most of the variation are due to aging, probably from exposure to sunlight in varying degrees over the last 88 years, and dirtiness or toning or whatever the term is that you care to use. The yellow cards can vary quite a bit, and are tough to find with bright yellow, because they are so susceptible to toning. Here is a photo of five Max Bishops that I happened to end up with. That toning can occur on all of the cards to some degree, but isn't as visible as it is on the yellow, so with other color background often results in dull looking colors.

I added a couple of my nicer cards below, the Combs came from REA and is probably my favorite of all of my 33's as far as background color, it looks even better in person! Happy hunting!

EDIT to add that grading companies seem to not really know what to do about faded colors, so grading is often completely independent of color saturation. The recent discussion about the #144 Ruth PSA 7 in the SCP auction is a great case in point.

[Carter08]

Great thread and interested to learn. I’ve had a few a few different color variations in hand and my very amateur opinion is they were born that way as opposed to starting the same and becoming different through time.

[steve B]

I'm positive that it's both.

Of course a card closing on 90 years old can have some fading, or some reduced brightness from wear and dirt etc from the air.

Even into the early 1980's, colors were mixed by hand by the press operator. A specific color like the Goudey reds and blues like on the Combs (a really great looking card) would have been mixed from the base magenta and cyan by adding specific amounts of other colors. And the "recipies" for each color often weren't precise. Like making a light green would start with cyan, adding yellow, And the major colors were listed in ounces. But then maybe some "drops" of black. Well, the drops where I worked were usually a dime sized glob. Different press operators might make theirs a different size. And different inks might be more or less runny so the drop would be flatter.

If the printer used inks from different sources, they could be more or less vibrant, even used directly like the Yellow probably was.

Combine that with batches that might have more or less colorant, or be more or less opaque... different inking levels etc.
One of the challenges was getting something you print in August to look exactly like the same job printed in May. We had a couple customers who required special colors for their company logo. And the place generally tried to have the same pressman do all of their jobs to get the consistency they wanted.
A big shop doing big runs of stuff for a candy company wouldn't have the same demands or much interest in being that picky about color.