T206 alignment and crop marks
 

Just got this Brown portrait. It has the most prominent alignment mark I've owned. Wondering how common these types of marks are, and would also love to see some others as I find them quite cool.

Here is one in the same spot.

Wilbur Goode is NOTORIOUSLY centered toward the bottom in almost every back.

That Dunn is awesome.

The Dunn is really helpful to me. I had always assumed that the horizontal lines were "cut here" marks, but really they were designed to set up the middles of the image. And you can actually see the remnants of those "cross hairs" on the borders of a number of the images, as if they were erased, except for the border. I assume the Dunn has a blank back?

I have always wondered why the line on the left side of this Doyle image looks like it had been drawn in by the printer. Must be he got too close when erasing the "plus sign" and erased part of the line itself. Better to leave just a little bit of it rather than risk erasing the line going forward. Really cool. Thanks for sharing.

Anybody else got a drawn in line on their Doyle, or any other card?

<a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/RT_TTyZolRxucQJw0nlwdTiJm_Z5QsNdec5_I7WHZRE?feat=e mbedwebsite"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-LK-r1QnIF7g/RzJyvHBXd8I/AAAAAAAACIo/OK6pVTtpD2o/s800-Ic42/Doyle%252520With%252520Bat%252520Auto%252520SGC%25 252060.JPG" height="800" width="494" /></a>

That is interesting why would a single card need centering marks on all four edges if it were printed on a sheet? Wouldn't that only be necessary if it were printed on a strip?

Maybe lining up all of the cards on the sheet to make sure they were all centered.

Heck of a nice scan Chris

cool card

That's it.

The cross lines are to help lay out the transfers onto the plate. There would be a network of either lines or dots that would define the grid, then the individual transfers would be transferred to the plate.

So the marks help get each one lined up just right, and since they're on all the colors it also helps making sure all the plates line up right with each other.

After the plate is laid out they should be erased, but obviously that didn't always happen. I'm not sure if they'd just let the leftover marks go, or if they would have erased them after a bit of use.

A lot of cards have the remnants of the lines as little segments that cross the middle of the side. of the image. I've been looking at Magies, and the pattern of the leftover lines is different with around 8-9 different. And there's plenty of back flaws that always match the pattern of alignment marks.

The drawn in border is a correction of an over zealous erasing. There's probably others, there are also some uncorrected gaps.

Steve B