OR, "The Silver Lake Sisters meet Jargo the Giraffe, and other unintentional impressions"

By Jim Moran, Hamilton Master Printer & Collections Officer Emeritus

The backdrop at this year’s Hamilton Wayzgoose was a mash-up of make ready; vintage poster fragments pulled from Hamilton’s Enquirer Collection graced the big red doors at our annual conference. 

All printers save their mistakes and misprints. They can be used to check color, recall registration and pack the impression for another job. In the case of Enquirer Printing, image blocks were always being made and if the block was less than type-high, any proof sheet could be cut down and attached to the backside. Occasionally, the packing sheet matched the image on top but far more often, it came from the pile of mis-prints laying around the press room.

Hamilton has hung on to these for many years and the remnants used at Wayzgoose came from a pile I have been collecting for eight years. They tell you far more than you’d guess.

Sometimes these images seem to be “prints from the isle of mis-printed posters.” Still, they are often the only example we have of how a poster should look, what colors were chosen or simply how NOT to handle the registration. The fragments are unintentionally interesting because of what was printed over what.

“Mom and Dad” The camera doesn’t lie! Penny’s Pets, Strange People, and Seven Dogs and a Pony all meet up at Feinberg Synagogue Annex on the same day! The Cincinnati Horse Show seems to claim, “We’ve got it for you,” as a circus performer gestures into a void. 

The dates and places and style of clothing and even the animals on display are great bits of information that inform us about the collection and how it was presented. As faded and dusty as they are, they contain a load of unexpected information.

They are lost fragments of time.