Finally went to the printing museum

[samosa4u]

Here is a close-up of the printing stone below. You can see that it was also used for making other products as well. Afterwards, they would just grind it down and reuse it, but that didn't happen to this one because it was probably at the end of its life cycle. It's amazing that it survived!

[steve B]

Originally Posted by samosa4u

Here is a close-up of the printing stone below. You can see that it was also used for making other products as well. Afterwards, they would just grind it down and reuse it, but that didn't happen to this one because it was probably at the end of its life cycle. It's amazing that it survived!

That's a wonderful artifact!

It's not the production stone, but the master for a bunch of stuff including that card. The production stones were resurfaced, but the masters were retained. The other things on that stone were probably jobs that would get done fairly often so keeping the master saved a lot of work. Luckily the card was on there too.

From this they would print transfers, using a very tarlike ink and printed on very thin paper.
Those transfers would be put on the production stone and adhered with solvent. The thin paper would also be removed while the solvent was still wet.

When you see a card from back then with a border gap or in T206 the messed up name and team, that's from a transfer that didn't transfer, or tore as it was being laid down and put back together.

We know T206 was at least mostly done from stones laid out with transfers.

[toppcat]

Old stones were often used as fill at building sites after they had been discarded by the lithographers. There's been some studies of this over the years and at least one PhD dissertation on the subject. Some survived that way while others were probably just taken home by workers for whatever reason.