Quote:
Originally Posted by Spike
Print runs for W516 baseball got cheaper as time went on, eventually cutting the number of different colors down to one or two. Several players _are_ known in all-black and all-blue, including yours. I've seen maybe 15-20 total in that style and consider them tough to find.
There's a good chance these one-color cards came out sometime after 1922 and proved "successful" enough that the W516 maker (Universal Toy & Novelty Co. of Illinois) took a similar approach when designing their larger 1925 team sets, which also stuck to single colors. I think using one color saved money and helped minimize printing errors.
Here's a similar W516 Hornsby with heavy black ink and (light) layer of red. You can see by the dates along its top edge that it was printed below a strip of US presidents and Teddy Roosevelt (1901-09) in particular. That implies heavy black ink versions for at least those two subjects.
In short, I think one-color cards were an effort to save Universal Toy some time and money when printing. Hope that helps!
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This is great much appreciated!!