Printing plates before Plates & Patches

[FireRob]

I have a hand full of various printing plates from the ‘90s and early 2000’s (all of Mike Singletary of course) that I have gotten off eBay over the years. Today I had two more delivered from a 1993 Pro Set and 1991 Pro Line. This got me to thinking about something I wondered about years ago when I acquired my first ever printing plate.

How where these distributed and ended up in the hands of the collectors? Obviously these date back way before the Plates and Patches of today where you get a plate in every pack.

I remember thinking back then that if these fell into the wrong (or correct) hands, how someone could make an unlimited number of these cards. Kinda like a scene from a movie where an evil mastermind who steals money plates from the mint and makes his own money. Ha ha ha. Little did I know back then how over printed these cards where and would be worthless in the future.

[FireRob]

Photo of the plates mentioned above

[bakemeister52]

I think the older plates not everybody collected them and they would move around in trades. I finally got a printing plate of Emmitt Smith and I was stoked but there are so many 1/1 out there that I think it has taken the fun out of collecting them today. The older ones are harder to get and not everybody knows about them like the newer ones.

Bake

[pwaldo]

Be careful buying printing plates from companies that went out of business like Classic and Pacific. They are most likely fake. The company never had any of them issued in packs and they only appeared on eBay decades after they went out of business.

[madduxfan31]

I was kind of wondered the same thing recently... I bought a collection which consisted of 75+ printing plates and 1/1's. There were two cards i wasn't sure of 97 new pinnacle & some 03? convention plate. Never really seen any of the earlier one's so I searched around and found a maddux plate with the same seller you bought those cards from above. Made me kind of suspect no bids on the 24.99 maddux and the seller had 1000+ different plates 4 sale. Found a couple of links where people thought someone was making plates from back in the day so i didn't pull the trigger. I think i'll get in trouble posting another trading sites link so i'll pm you link.

[bakemeister52]

Good point Peter. I didn't think about it till Peter said EBay only for selling them. I had thought about buying into some of the deals. There was a deal on an Emmitt now I won't even think about it!

Bake

[FireRob]

I read a post in another forum that was sent to me about some eBay fakes. Anyone have any doubts about the ones I posted pictures of and and explanation on why? I can take it.

Real or fake they will be a part of my collection from now on. To me, it’s not any worse than all these sketch cards, lithograph cards and I think I read it called a “custom card” or a home made cards that have an autograph pealed off one card and stuck to another that I have seen on this forum. Which personally I think is sac religious to do to a card.

Back to the original question at hand. I read something about a going out of business sale and that is how some printing plates made it to market. Anyone know any other ways these older plates got on the collectors market?

[jplcom]

I like your attitude about treating them like the custom cards. Still cool!

[BlackDiam0nd66]

I remember when a bunch of the Collectors Edge plates got out into the market after they folded.....I have never seen the ones you posted (Proline).

I've always wondered why some plates are reversed and some are not. I have some of both, reversed and not.

I remember reading that Printing plates have the reverse images and Press plates do not. Not sure if that is true or not.

I sent you a message as well.

[51CardDeck]

I used to work with print companies years ago and I've seen these types of threads numerous times.
If they image is not a reverse negative, just avoid it, it's not a true printing press plate.

In printing, they are referred to as Printing Press Plates and if they were used for printing, they would all be reverse negative images.

This type of printing is called offset printing and uses 4 colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.

The material of these plates are usually aluminum or an aluminum alloy if it is a large print run. [for business cards, flyers, etc that are 1 time print, the material is either paper or plastic)
In order to print 1 card, they actually require 8 plates, 4 CMYK front plates and 4 CMYK back plates, the ones inserted into packs are only the front plates and corners are cut round for safety.
(I wonder what they do with the back plates?)

These so called plates are actually large aluminum sheets with multiple cards. Once they are done printing, they cut these into individual card size and round off the corners.

Just like as in any printing job, a test run is required after set up. Topps Vault sells these as blank backs, 1/1. You also see Panini insert them into their Black Friday and Father's Day packs.
In the early years, all these test prints were just thrown out and collectors would go dumpster diving and acquire uncut sheets at times. Others were backdoored.

In the early to mid 90s when lot of these companies went bankrupt, all these plates were auctioned off or backdoored.
If you had a complete set, some print shops will be able to print these out for you especially older places that print business cards.

Hope this helps.