Copper printing plates

[voodoopenguin]

New year so another push at sorting and clearing stuff.

We seem to have inherited a number of old copper printing plates, mainly to do with my late father-in-law's family business like letterheads and the plate for printing company cheques. Company long gone so only of family history sake but there was one that had us puzzled, why did they have this here in the UK?



A few years ago I had prints made from most of the plates to see them better and not mirror image.

Paul

[cbelt3]

Looks like late 1860's / 1870's art. Possibly even into the early 1900's. Odds are the customer didn't want to trust his vital printing job to we bloody colonials. After all, the US was the cheap labor center of Europe. "Offshoring" and "outsourcing" from London ended up in New York, etc..

[DP]

I think that might be worth a few quid...

[OWC Jamie]

stmp or coin collecting ?

[Gutenberg]

Paul, I am wondering if one of your FIL's clients was the Columbia Club, which was a traditional club for U.S. military officers stationed in England. Or perhaps the U.S. Embassy was a client.

[voodoopenguin]

Obviously didn't explain it properly, my father-in-law's company was not a printing firm, they were engineers. The copper plates were ones used for their own company and sent to printers when more cheques, company note paper etc. were needed. That's what makes it the more strange that this plate was among them. My father-in-law was a bit of a collector of anything out of the ordinary and maybe this was obtained on one of those printing firm visits or somewhere totally different.

Probably end up on eBay!

Paul

[Acer]

Looks very collectible for someone into Americana.

[Gutenberg]

OK, now that is odd. I can't think of a reason for a British engineering firm to use that plate.

Sorry I misunderstood.

[M>B>]

What could someone named "Gutenberg" ever know anything about printing?