The flaw would most likely have occurred while laying out the stone. For that position, the A just didn't transfer properly.
I doubt it was fixed, the simplest fix would have been scratching in or painting in the rest of the A on the stone, which would usually be obvious.
The scenario for why that many different backs would be a matter of how the orders were placed as well as how the cards were produced.
I think it's most probable that the orders were for a certain number of cards with a particular back. And it's also probable that to some extent, the player selection was part of the order. The bit of packing logbook the specifies something like "for not Philadelphia area" would indicate that there was some regional distribution. It's entirely possible that the brands with fewer sales would be ordered together with a certain selection of players.
The larger brands may have been ordered simply as "X number of Piedmont baseball subjects" (Or something like that. )
The selection for the smaller brands may have been arranged around one of the more mid range brands. And the exact selection simply up to timing.
So yes, there would have been a large stack of fronts somewhere.
The question is what exactly was done.
Usually the required fronts would be brought to the press all together. The presses were a bit slow and may have been manually fed. Even with an automatic feeder chasing around the shop for a fistful of fronts wouldn't be done as it's just too inefficient. So if the order is for say 20,400 cards, then maybe 100 sheets would be brought to the press. (assuming a 12x17 subject sheet ) Those would be run all at once, and sent to cutting/packing after they were dry. (Unless they were shipped uncut to the ATC packing plant.) The number seems low, even for brands with few sales like Lenox or Broadleaf.
Larger brands would probably have larger sheets, that would have been used for … maybe everything down to maybe Old Mill or Polar Bear. Those two brands being in an odd spot, Polar Bear certainly got at least one sheet that was all its own and with some OMs being very tough they may have as well.
Production being what it is, if these were ongoing print jobs, there would have been extra sheets printed. Either in anticipation of a future order, or as backup in case something went very wrong, like printing a big portion of the order in the wrong color, or feeding a couple hundred sheets upside down causing excessive waste.
The question becomes, once it's clear that Lenox won't be needing any more cards, what do you do with the leftover sheets of fronts that are perfectly good? Run them on some other brand, hopefully another of the smaller brands, or maybe you make a Piedmont stone to match the smaller sheet and run them as Piedmonts
(It may have been technically possible to run the smaller sheet with the larger stone, but we'll mostly ignore that for the moment, and there's no actual proof that the sheets were different sizes besides the logic of using much larger sheets for Piedmont and SC where the orders were probably for a million or so if not X number a month until we say stop )
|