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Sunday, April 20, 2014
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9 comments:
Were the dimensions based on
the printing press capabilities
What were the standard sizes
How many sheets in the largest
"daubs" if that's the term
I'm told that the dimension of
window cards (14"x22") is based
on half sheets of a standard
size of sheets of glass
Thanks Dave
Kitzman told me he thought it all began with paper sizes available to printers, but it could have been based on the beds of letterpresses. I have no idea about the sizes of lithograph stones.
I know the size of a 1-sheet changed in the early 20th Century from approximately 30" by 40" to approximately 28" by 42"
I hadn't heard the glass pane story and I frankly doubt it. Standard window cards are a little more than half of a half-sheet, being 14" by 22".
Kitzman was right! It all appears to be based upon how big a sheet of paper could be made in the late 1700s/early 1800s when large presses started to be built by the 1830s. Paper is difficult to make with a smoothness necessary for good printing. Literally, your dipping a large screen in a frame (like a silk screen) into a vat of mushy white water made of beaten linen rags (wood bulb was not used until the 1870s). You had to lift it out of the water getting an even spread of the mush and let it dry--and you have a sheet of paper! (I've even done it making a 4" square piece of paper). Machines began to do this work but it was difficult--and expensive.
When lithograpy came about, the stones (only available in Bavaria) were cut to match the already determined paper sizes.
There was a country rube who saw one of the large circus posters of many sheets (according to a big city newspaper of the mid-1800s) who thought they must have had some enormous presses in the big city to print such barn-size posters!
I also highly doubt the glass story.
Dick Flint
Baltimore
For What it's worth....30 x 40 is one of the "standard" sizes of blue prints. I think the 28 x 42 is too. (I'll have to check from my work computer. It's got the drafting software on it.)
These are the larger size drawings, and not as popular today as in the past. Everything is smaller. So maybe there is some validity that the early sheets were in these sizes based on the paper available.
Dick: Was that the same guy who asked, "How did you get that big tent thru that little gate?"
Just spoke with an OLD timer
from theatrical advertising &
he said that early window cards
were of some slightly different
sizes but since framers charged
more to cut glass to 14" x 21"
which was a quarter sheet size
(small sheets of glass came in
a 22" x 28" size) they changed
most cards to 14" x 22"
Colonial Williamsburg probably
still has the papermaker's shop
behind their printshop where
that early technique is shown
There was a recent poster on eBay for the Downie and Wheeler Circus that was 14" x 21" as a flat. I never knew there was a quarter sheet poster until I saw that one.
Bob
Chic:
Your OLD timer is entitled to his opinion as am I.
There have been many sizes of cardboard posters both within and without the theatrical field. I personally have theatrical window cards printed by Strobridge in the following sizes: 14" x 29" (Mme Blanche Marchessi), 17" x 23" (Anna Held), 12" x 17" (Maude Fealey), 11" x 14" (Sol Smith Russell) and Klaw & Erlanger's Ben Hur in both 9" x 14" and 7" x 12". If these were all framed we assume glass had to be cut to fit each size. Were printers influenced by the glass cutting for these?
We didn't frame window cards in the circuses I worked for so the problem never arose, but when did this supposed shift take place?
If very long ago a quarter sheet would not have been 14" x 21" but closer to 15" x 20"
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