Quote:
Originally Posted by Pat R
Greg, your T220 uncut sheets thread stirred up some interesting investigating and some of that reinforced a thought that I've had for a long time that American Lithograph had several "subcontractors" printing tobacco cards for them. There were massive amounts of them printed during the T206 era and beyond and even though they were by far the largest lithograph company at the time it would have been a monumental task to keep up with the orders.
We see inconsistency's in most set's from that time frame and having the same cards printed at different places would explain a lot of the inconsistency's we see. Using a t206 examples I wouldn't be surprised if the Magie was never corrected and it was just an error made in the printing of that card by one of the smaller "subcontractors".
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The more we've learned, the more I think your hypothesis is the case. It fits with all our evidence, it explains a lot of the seeming gaps and problems, and most importantly it appears to have been the case for other smaller sets that were part of the ATC T card promotion and moved from Brett to elsewhere at least once.
Brett doesn't seem to have done the entire printing of all the sets in Fullgraff's notebook, it looks like they probably shared contracts (T225 Hyland at Brett at least in part, T218 somewhere other than Brett), Brett appears to be a shadow subsidiary of American Lithographic. I'm still trying to find the incontrovertible proof that Brett was indeed a subsidiary or independent, but it appears these partner firms were intentionally obfuscated to avoid anti-trust problems. The correspondence, employments histories, and bizarre collaboration on very small projects between the firms doesn't make sense if they were independent though. Also still hunting for any record that Fullgraff was the PM for the T206's, or if someone else was. I'm unclear if he was the program manager for all the cards, or only some of them that were centered at the Brett subsidiary.
The Plank could be something as boring as only being on one of the facilities sheets for no real reason in particular. His appearance in 2 series makes little sense with most of the more exciting theories for his SP'ing. I feel like the last couple of years we've got to a place where we know what it is we are looking for more precisely, dealing with "known unknowns" more than the "unknown unknowns" of previous.