I recently picked up this Claude Ritchey Old Mill. I bought it based on a very small scan, so all I could tell was that the card looked to be in pretty good condition and the background was quite dark. When it arrived in the mail, I immediately noticed the right side of the back. At first I thought the little black lines were some sort of transfer from another card, or possibly foreign ink. Upon closer inspection, it became pretty clear that it was printed at the same time as the rest of the black ink on the back.
I knew exactly who to contact to find out more. I sent an email to my friend Steve Birmingham, who is an expert on printing processes. His reply was so interesting that I wanted to use the info for an article. Steve graciously agreed, so here is our correspondence. I hope you find it as fascinating as I did!
Me: “Have you ever seen this strange “print jump” (for lack of a better term) that happened on the right border of the back of this card?”
Steve:
I haven’t seen that exact thing on Ritchey, but I’m pretty sure I know what it is. I’ve seen another card that’s similar, on Criger there are some Piedmont backs that show the right upper curl of the back duplicated.
There are only a few possibilities for that with lithography. The two I can think of are equally likely.
First option:
The plates were probably laid out using transfers. Like ruboffs only a bit more involved. If the transfer got set down in the wrong spot and they didn’t totally erase it OR if the transfer didn’t adhere properly and they didn’t erase it completely before putting down the replacement, there would be remnants of it that would print.Second option:
The plates did wear over time, after a certain number of impressions the stone would need to be resurfaced and new transfers laid down. Again, an incomplete resurfacing would leave remnants of the earlier image, and those would print.At first I thought it was very thin areas that peeled during a soak and got pressed down out of place. But the back only scan shows no sign of it at all.
The stamp guys look to see a second identical copy, as proof that it’s a plate fault and not some printing quirk. There should be another one out there somewhere.
There are ways it could happen as a one time printing error, but they’re all a bit of a reach in the likely/not likely equation.
After receiving this email from Steve, I looked at the other Ritchey Old Mill that I own, and a scan of one I owned previously. Neither had a similar “print jump”. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, but I found some interesting marks including three players from the 150-350 series with identical marking on the back in the exact same spot. That may be another topic for a different day.
This next email from Steve is really cool in that he lays out a systematic approach to looking at print marks and oddities. I completely missed most of the marks he references, but they were clear as day when I went back to take a closer look.
Nice pickup, I haven’t seen one before except for the Criger Piedmont.
Finding a second copy is always more difficult on tougher cards, and finding progressive varieties tougher still.
By progressive, I mean something like that Ritchey showing a repaired flaw. The press operator can fix small stuff like that by stoning it off, which is basically using a limestone stick like a crayon to remove the oil attracting image area. That’s probably how the really rare Doyle was created, the error was spotted and the stone fixed during production.
A Ritchey OM that has border gaps where the extra bits of border are would be a probable repair, especially if it had some identical identifier on the front showing it was the same position. There aren’t any of the layout marks at the halfway points of the front border, but there are a couple possible marks that would identify the position as the same one. At the upper left there’s a dark blue heart shaped mark, at the left side of the lower border there’s another blue mark, and there’s a brown spot on the pants at about mid thigh. It’s hard to tell if they’re printed or just random ink spots, but another OM from the same spot on the sheet would probably have at least one of those marks.
A couple bonuses- There are a bunch of other marks on the back that are less obvious, but are spaced as far right from a line as the obvious ones.
And there’s a faint group of marks that don’t fit the OM back that I think are remnants of the P150 scratch. I’ll have to look at the scans I have, but the marks show as lines in the lower left ornament, through the L in large, the top of the B in Base ball, and possibly very faintly in the G above that.
It’s either leftover from the P150 scratch, or is its own damage.
The gray on the front is printed very heavily too. None of the scans on Ebay are good enough for me to tell if it’s a different gray layer than the 150’s, but the sky with the dark blue pattern is almost always a 350 back. (There’s a P150 with that sky on ebay now, but graded A by SGC so it may be rebacked. )
Well, I’m off to go examine all of my 150-350 series Old Mill backs. If I find anything interesting, I’ll be sure to let you know. I want to give a big thanks to Steve for providing the content for this impromptu post. Thanks Steve!