T206 with light grey writing under caption

[steve B]

That's a very cool card.
A couple ideas on how it happened, and a shift isn't one. The black is shifted up and right compared to the gray elsewhere, so having gray be up and left of the black caption doesn't work for a simple shift.

One possibility is that it's a remnant of when a worn plate was resurfaced and the transfers re-done. If the resurfacing wasn't complete, a misplaced and partial caption could be the result.

The other idea is that the caption was mistakenly added to the gray plate and only partly erased. Or that it transferred poorly and they just didn't bother fixing it.


On a different track, I've mentioned before that some cards show some indication that a two color press was used. This is a great example.
Yellow and Gray are both a bit left of the other colors, but are registered very well to each other.
Brown is shifted up and right along with black, but it's hard to tel if they're shifted the same distance.