T206 Murr'y: New Back Discovered & What Murr'y Says About T206 Printing

[Jobu]

I have been tracking the T206 Murr'y and am happy to add a brand new back to the list - my Sovereign 460:

T206 Murry Sov 460 c jpg.jpg

I also have one of the Tolstois, so I have done a lot of research on this card. I believe the new find brings the total known Murr'y examples to 13 individual cards spread across at least 6 backs:

1. Lenox (black) – 1 card
2. Old Mill – 3 cards
3. Tolstoi – 2 cards
4. Sweet Caporal 350-460/30 – 4 cards
5. Piedmont 350-460/25 – 1 card
6. Sovereign 460 – 1 card

I said “at least 6 backs” because there is a front-only scan on the T206 museum (http://www.t206museum.com/page/ga_murray.html). This card doesn’t seem to match the other scans that I have, but it is possible that it is the Piedmont 350-460 because I don’t have a scan of that one either. If anyone has either of these scans, or knows N. Racine who apparently contributed the scan to the T206 Museum, please let me know.

Many of the scans I have are clearly crappy – if you have a better copy, you know what to do.

I have records of 20 sales, many of which are multiple sales of individual cards. There is one 2007 eBay sale with no scan – it was graded SGC 10 at the time. There is a chance that this is the Sweet Caporal card that I do have a scan of.

Here are all of the scans that I have:

Murry Collage Full.jpg

I wrote a previous T206 thread arguing that the fronts of cards were usually, but not always, printed first (post 10):

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=221694):

The Murr’y error is a good example of a “front first” card. With 13 examples spread across 6 backs, it seems likely that the printer created a stack of complete fronts with blank backs. In the process, they damaged the plate and broke the A. The printer fixed the flaw quickly, didn’t print all that many with the broken A, and decided that the error was small enough that it wasn’t worth scrapping the finished sheets.

The Murr’y also tells us that these 6 backs were printed concurrently. This makes sense because all of these backs are in the 460 series (http://www.t206resource.com/Series%20460.html).

It also tells us that all of these backs were printed at the same factory. That isn’t a blanket statement for all T206 (I know there is some disagreement over one vs. multiple print shops), but for these backs we can confirm at least some of them were printed in the same place.

The amazing thing with the Murr’y error is what the large number of backs for the small overall number of cards says about the printing process. I have three hypotheses for how this might have happened.

HYPOTHESIS 1

I think the general assumption is that printers ran off huge consecutive batches of cards for each particular back. While that may have been standard practice, Murr’y shows that this may not have always been the case.

If we assume a single press, this means that within a single large stack of finished fronts, a printer split the small total number of Murr’y fronts across 6 backs .

Scot Reader mused that maybe 1% or less of the original T206s printed survive. Applying 1% to the Murr’y, that means that 1300 error cards were printed. So, within a stretch of 1300 sheets in a pile, the printer filled an order for 6 backs. Assuming an equal order size for each back within the pile, each back brand order averaged 216.67 cards.

It could also be that a longer print run for a back ended just at the first card and a long print run for another back started with the last error card, but that would still mean that 4 complete orders were printed out of 1298 cards for an average of 324.5 cards/back in each of those orders.

These are much smaller orders than I would have assumed were commonly filled given the need to set up a press to run each back brand. Given this, I think something else is likely going on.

HYPOTHESIS 2

It could also be that multiple presses were run at the same time, each printing a different back.

Under this scenario, the printers would have grabbed handfuls (maybe about 216 sheets deep????) of the blank backed sheets and taken them to their presses. If multiple backs were being printed concurrently, it is easy to see how the Murr’y could have been spread across so many backs with so few total error cards being produced.

(Aside: Obviously some or all of the presses in the room could have printed a single back for huge order and not all of the presses would have had to be in use at the same time. Or, even if all the presses were active at once, they didn’t all have to be in use to print T206 at the same time, which would explain how the Lash’s Bitters and T82 Heroes of History scraps came to be printed on T206.)

HYPOTHESIS 3

It also have been that there multiple piles of backless fronts and printers randomly grabbed from different piles. This would theoretically have allowed for one or two presses to create the Murr’y back distribution that we see. This seems unlikely though as each pressman would likely have been closer to one pile than he was to all of the other piles, so I don’t know why he would pull sheets off of anything but the closest pile to him. (Exception: if two presses were back to back with multiple stacks of sheets between them then the stacks might have been close enough to equidistant for them to pull sheets off the top left to right.)

CONCLUSION

Hypotheses 1 and 3 both require some legwork, so I think hypothesis 2 seems like the simplest and most likely scenario. For the cards that had the smaller total print runs, like Lenox, it could be that the Lenox press completed that back and was then shut down or switched over to one of the other low total print run backs. This would let this scenario play out with fewer than 6 presses running T206 at the same time.

I am looking forward to everyone’s thoughts.