1958 Topps Hank Aaron - BLUE background??

[steve B]

Originally Posted by con40

All 1958 Topps Aarons are faded. Maybe the first few were unintentional finds in card shops where the octogenarian owner left his inventory in the window for a decade, but since then, several of these have popped up with different shades of blue (cyan ink).

If the yellow was truly omitted from just one card on the sheet (really?) then that blue would be just solid cyan ink and would look the same all the time since it's just solid ink.

If the yellow had been omitted from even a portion of the print plate, then we'd see more "yellowless" 58s out there. News flash.... there are no others! Hmmm, what does that tell us?

Think about the 1982 Topps "Blackless". The omission of the black ink affected 132 cards and is pretty universal in appearance on the affected cards and there are multiple copies of each card int he marketplace that all look alike.

1958 Topps Hank Aaron authentic "yellowless" is a unicorn.

I'm not sure we can reliably say "All" although I'd readily agree to "most" or even "nearly all"

The partial sheet shown here is unevenly faded, but shows the surrounding cards. http://toppsarchives.blogspot.com/2010/05/88s-key.html

The masks used to make the plates were assembled by hand, and an error wouldn't be entirely unheard of. I'm not entirely sure if they used a photo negative of the entire sheet and masked off portions or used some other method,(Portions of a sheet more likely, individual cards possible but unlikely) but there are differences throughout Topps production. With the white/yellow team or player name cards we know that the yellow part of things was redone at least once.

Topps didn't necessarily use a strict CMYK setup, and the blue used wasn't always a straight Cyan. Going away from true Cyan means custom mixing the color, and that was done manually. So there will be different shades of the blue used. inking levels, water levels, and stuff done to adjust the thickness of the ink could also change the look.

There are a few ways a color can be missing. Some affect only part of a plate -1990 Thomas no name and the others were probably from tape blocking part of the light while the plate was being exposed. A sheet can get folded over blocking part of the print. Foreign material can get into the press blocking some portion of the print. Some of these would produce only one card, some more than one.

1982 blackless are their own puzzle. Topps at the time printed large sheets which were dual 132 card sheets that got cut down into 132 card sheets probably to make handling easier. Usually those sheets were not the same sheet but two different sheets side by side. To only affect half of that large sheet would require some odd circumstances. I believe the late 50's sheets were also printed as dual sheets as there are usually two different sheets for each series.

A genuine blue 58 Topps Aaron may be a unicorn, but may also be a findable unicorn. The hard question is how to tell for sure.

Steve B