What Happens When The Pressman Takes A Long Break While Printing

This is a copy of Scott RF10d, with a triple surcharge.

Not often seen.

Jim

It was probably the first sheet of the day, assuming it is genuine. Used to line up the rest of the printing.

Liquid lunch?

It also escaped whoever was supposed to inspect the printing and send bad ones for destruction. The Inverted Jenny and all such things that seem like obvious errors, somebody was supposed to inspect the printed sheets before distribution.

Essentially it's a surcharge/cancel to show that the new increased tax on playing cards was paid. There is no reason for them to think that anyone then would notice some multiple printings of the surcharge, or that they would think about the possibility that it might be valuable to collectors 100 years later. They would not want to waste the stamps or make the card company wait, with a war on the government wanted the tax money.

A minor clarification:

These cancel/surcharge combinations were applied by the playing card manufacturers themselves, in house, per the note in Scott to that effect.

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing applied their surcharge only to RF16. Later, in the 1930s, they also applied precancels.

So, the liquid lunch explanation makes the most sense, in that the various card manufacturers had already paid for the stamps, and could really care less about making sure that their cancel/surcharge was applied perfectly, let alone right side up, or even with just one impression.




I'm pretty sure that the stamps went from the printing press directly to the assembly line worker, who had to stick one stamp at a time on each pack of fresh playing cards.

Jim

They probably didn't care which way they read, but they would have wanted their initials to be readable since it was one more form of advertising. Companies always care about that. This kind of variety would be MUCH more common if they really didn't care how they were applied. The "liquid lunch" theory is always the first one given for multiple impressions like this, but it's probably the least likely reason.

Well then I'll vote for myopia as another theory.

It's understood that the majority of pressmen at the time desired to produce a clean product, but a glance at the Scott Specialized section for playing cards will show that that was, well, frequently not the case.

An invert or a double here or there could be chalked up to a bad day, but there are so many varieties that it's pretty clear that, in some companies at least, their quality control was a bit "loose."

Jim

All these printing jobs had to be lined up at the start. That was going to produce what in stamps might be called "printer's waste". Since they were only surcharge/cancels, and no one wanted to waste the stamps, they got used. Again, the idea that they might be valuable to someone someday did not exist. It was just expedience.

Having operated a printing press for several years, I can say that no pressman would use a "live" pane of actual stamps to set up his press.

Blank sheets of paper, of identical size, would have been used.

If the actual stamps were used, and there was any kind of problem, it would have cost the playing card company money that would have been difficult to get reimbursed.

These surcharges were all applied by letterpress, one sheet at a time.

There was minimal "lining up" of the press, other than verifying that the ink level was high enough and that the sheet of paper was centered correctly in the press.

The fact is, that double and triple and inverted impressions on the playing card stamps are all the result of sloppy workmanship, nothing more or less than that.

An even better example of this is the RF9 stamps that have the surcharge in the incorrect ink color.

Jim

So you actually think that some pressman was so drunk that it took three passes through just to get a 7 in the center of the stamp? Or that he would care??? This is a simple cancel job. No experienced pressman is likely to be so sloppy without a valid reason. Since it's the manufacturer, they were probably using the same presses that created the cards and the boxes. So a certain amount of maneuvering to line up the stamps was probably necessary, and since the stamps were just showing a tax was paid and was sealing up the box they would have put up with one sheet that had multiple impressions if they had to.

By 1918 these were not likely to be sloppy people....

http://www.wopc.co.uk/usa/russell-playing-card-co/

The playing cards were printed by lithography.

The surcharges/cancels were printed by letterpress.

Two different printing presses.

Since the multiple impressions are all well-inked, it's clear that the double and triple impressions are the result of the pressman simply not removing the pane of tax paid stamps before the pane went back up for a second (or third) impression.

Perhaps he was distracted for a moment.

This particular task was apparently not that important to most of the manufacturers, as varieties such as split surcharges, cancels in the wrong ink color, and so on are plentiful.

What was important, as was pointed out, was that the product itself was of high quality.

Jim

"Plentiful" is not a word I would use. Certainly they all exist; a few are relatively common but many are quite scarce. And there were several different companies creating the surcharge/cancels for themselves. So while some might well have been sloppy and/or disinterested, surely not all of them were. "Sloppy" just seems to me an insufficient reason and an easy way out. Which cancels are in the wrong ink color?

See the varieties under RF9, specifically RF9g.

I was saying that the number of varieties are plentiful.

Perhaps "numerous" is better?

The stamps themselves, with these varieties, are not (in most cases).

Jim

The RF9 colors are NOT "wrong ink colors", they are each for different companies which later became divisions of the USPCCo.