What is the origin of Frank Thomas NNOF?

[jacksoncoupage]

A couple things to keep in mind with these cards.

There exists other degrees of missing black ink on the affected area subjects.

Thomas missing little chips and pieces of his name, Marcus Lawton with small blackless pieces, etc. So there was some type of transition between the original plate/print flaw and correction. Or perhaps the minor missing-black cards were a precursor to the famous ones.

The green sheet subjects are also prone to missing black ink. Chris Gwynn, Roger Salkeld, Jerome Walton are a few I have pulled (from junk boxes/hand collated sets, not sealed product). These, like the orange sheet cards, are not faded or "going blackless" but missing smaller sized areas of the card's black print.

And last year a seller on ebay had found (on ebay) a full, uncut, blackless "dark blue" border sheet. No black ink whatsoever. He had them cut and sold off singles. I believe a Dale Murphy was the big name on that one. He may have a few commons up for sale still.

Oh and this is 100% second-hand information from almost 20 years ago but I was working in card shop and whenever the subject of errors or odd cards stuff came up, one of our regulars would tell a story about how he bought out a local arcade's vending machine stock of cards. He described them as machines that dispensed cards for $0.25 or $0.50 (don't recall qty or exact price). Anyway, he bought these cardboard boxes filled with junk, mostly 1990 Topps. He had sorted through them looking for Thomas and Juan Gonzalez, eventually he came across a Thomas and was "disappointed" to discover that it had most of his name printed on front. He described it as either missing the beginning or ending of his name (FRANK THOM ), I do not recall, but remember trying to visualize it. I've grilled him about this over the years and he claims it was never sold and sits buried in a box in storage.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by jacksoncoupage

A couple things to keep in mind with these cards.

There exists other degrees of missing black ink on the affected area subjects.

Thomas missing little chips and pieces of his name, Marcus Lawton with small blackless pieces, etc. So there was some type of transition between the original plate/print flaw and correction. Or perhaps the minor missing-black cards were a precursor to the famous ones.

More likely they came just after.

The obstructing object, whatever it was - and I'm thinking it was some tape- was removed from the platemaking machine, but not as well as it should have been, leaving a few bits behind. Not at all a stretch --- Hey, that black plate you made is a mess, we need a new one NOW!
Later on, maybe a lot, maybe a little they realize the new one isn't great, and get another. In between the platemaker has really cleaned the machine, (and probably the whole work area, nobody likes getting in trouble over stray tape)
And the next plate is just fine.

[West]

Pretty good notes and stories here. Many of you have already seen these but I'll throw in some scans to match names to faces. The "partial missing black" run has been mentioned as a "precursor" or perhaps more accurately, a "postscript" to the NNOF error run.

A partial missing black Frank Thomas:


A properly authenticated BGS "partial missing black" owned by Joe:



3 known cards affected by the partial missing black error run (I believe the Magrane could possibly be a 4th):


Notice that the Tapani has a very faint, vertical/slightly diagonal blue line running up the card that passes through the middle of his face. Check out an actual blackless Tapani with the exact same blue line which tells you the printing plates are directly related:


A run of different Marcus Lawton errors pulled from the same case by Joe (RookieWax). L to R, a blackless Lawton from NNOF run, a partially missing black from the related error run, and a partial missing black variation:



A slight correction to the post about green sheet errors only containing border breaks. Here are two (of 4 known) partial blackless Chris Speier that I own:



Other partial blackless from green sheet:




A normal Leibrandt (left) and a Leibrandt with border breaks (right):

[jacksoncoupage]

Originally Posted by West

A slight correction to the post about green sheet errors only containing border breaks. Here are two (of 4 known) partial blackless Chris Speier that I own:

I didn't mean to say the green sheet blackless cards were only border breaks, I meant that they were clearly missing all black ink in certain areas, not fading out or grayish, etc. Cited border breaks as an example since Salkeld, Gwynn and Walton had missing black ink noticeably affecting their borders.

[West]

Gotcha, that makes sense.

I do believe I have read that there are differences - in terms of the causation of the error - between the cards only missing border breaks vs cards that have both border breaks and cloudy/blackless areas in the photograph/nameplate/team name areas. Not versed enough in offset lithography to remember the differences, and I could be wrong.

Either way, quite interesting to see the Drabek and related errors. Quality control on the factory sets couldn't have been great...

[jacksoncoupage]

Here's the link to the guy with the blackless dark blue sheet cards:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_odk...topps&_sacat=0

[lowpopper]

The purpose of this thread is to unveil which packs/sets are producing
which errors....and ultimately where the NNOF might possibly be found.

I got my A & B sheet partial blackless from this set here. The orange F sheet was basically unaffected.