A mix-up with McVilly & Litle cards

[Des_Beechey]

McVilly & Little, Fancy Goods merchants of LIverpool Street, Hobart, published about a dozen series of cards. I have just come across a case where the same image was used twice in the one series, a situation I have never seen before in M&L cards. It is in the M&L b&w series, with number 10 and number 38. The two cards are shown below:

3831F.jpg (142.48 KiB) Viewed 1393 times

4800F.jpg (386.42 KiB) Viewed 1393 times

But the two cards are not exactly the same, as they have different skies! The procedure was for the customer to supply a picture to the printer, which the printer's artist would enhanced if the clouds did not stand out enough. Some how or other they used the same basic image twice, and put in different clouds. This is very unusual for McVilly & Little cards - I have never seen a double up like this in the same series before. But they often reused images in different series.

Des Beechey

[Ross Ewington]

Interesting to note that there is a child visible in the LL corner of the bottom image but not in the top (even the RH side of the card shows the same 'amount' of the Imperial Hotel wall and veranda); also the position of COLLINS STREET, HOBART is not identical for both cards.

Perhaps the series was re-printed at some stage and alterations were made.