A year or so ago Ross posted a query about printed postcards with an "Empire" logo. Ross pointed out that "Empire" was a brand of postcard-back printing paper, but he had a printed postcard with the Empire logo incorporated. His card was published by A. Mather & Co.
I am putting the Mather cards on my web site at the moment, and have come across two more cards of this type. The front and back of one of these cards is shown below.
- 3369F.jpg (125.69 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
- 3369B.jpg (131.28 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
There are two bits of evidence that show that this card above, and Ross' card, was printed by C.G. Roder, Liepzig, Germany, as other Mather, McVilly & Little, and Walch postcards were. Firstly, microscopic examination shows that the card was printed by three layers of lithography (red, yellow, blue) with a black collotype layer superimposed for emphasis. This was the usual printing method of C.G. Roder for coloured cards.
Secondly, the card has a printers number of 93772 on the back, at bottom right. This number is in the position, font and colour of Roder numbers. We can date Roder printer numbers from other sources: this one, 93772, was printed in 1906, with agrees with the date in the correspondence of 25 April, 1907.
Recall the mechanism of how colour cards were printed at the time. As there was no colour photography, a black and white photographic print was sent to the printer in Germany. The colourists invented colours for the image, from which three colour printing plates were prepared. For the back of the card, the printer did the layout according to the instructions from the customer, or if none were supplied or were inadequate, they used their house style and their own judgement.
My suggestion, somewhat outlandish, is that Mathers sent a black and white print on Empire back paper to the printers. The printers, having never seen Empire printing paper before (it was an Australian product) assumed the logo on the back was Mather's logo and incorporated it in the design of the back of the card.
Does anyone believe me?
Des Beechey
An excellent piece of deduction there Des - many thanks!!