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Posted By: J Hull

When I was reading through a couple lithography handbooks from the early 1900s I was struck by how much of a constant battle it was for the pressman to maintain registration through the process.

T206s were run through the press six or more times, one for each color. So that’s six times the sheet had to be aligned to the printing plate/printing press, within the very tight registration allowances, in order to produce a coherent overlayered image.

But there were two very interesting points I came across in the books. The first was the significant effect that changes in humidity and temperature had on the printing process. Keep in mind there were no climate controlled rooms back then. The humidity in particular could cause the paper to very slightly shrink or expand in size. Those changes wouldn’t be perceptible to the eye, but they would wreak havoc with registration. T206s must have been printed over a number of days, because each color ink most likely had to be allowed time to dry before the next could be applied. So on Monday when yellow ink was printed the weather and humidity could be one thing, and Wednesday when blue ink was added the weather and humidity could be completely different. The lithography book noted that the larger the sheet of paper, the more exaggerated the shrinking/expanding effect.

Similarly, each time the sheet went through the press it got wet, from the water/ink lithographic process, and squashed, by the press. This could cause the sheet to also very slightly expand in size, again messing with the registration. I have no idea whether the paper stock used for T206s was given to this type of expansion, but from the books it’s clear some types of paper stock were.

The net effect was that on large sheets, say 36 inches or more in length, the pressman could have the sheet in perfect registration for the top row of cards, and yet for the bottom row at the end of the sheet the registration could be off by as much as 1/16th of an inch. I’ve seen a lot of misregistered T206s, but the lithography books made me think that relatively smaller sheets were probably more likely to be used than very large ones.

Jamie