> ...that is exactly what John Davis of Poster Mountain did do with the Dracula
> poster -- examine it under the microscope. And he what he saw lead him to
> believe it was genuine because it "looked like old printing consistent" with
> the 1930s.
Although I have the utmost respect for John Davis (and have used his services
before), I believe that he made a few key incorrect assumptions with regard to
evaluating that Dracula onesheet under the scope.
First, he probably assumed or believed that the original Dracula onesheets were
offset printed, and did not know that they were stone litho (as we are told).
Had he known otherwise, he would most assuredly not have given his stamp of
approval to the poster in question. As mentioned and demonstrated by myself and
others, offset and stone litho look nothing alike under magnification.
Second, he may have also assumed or believed that one can distinguish 'old'
offset printing from 'new' offset printing. I am not sure that this is the
case, especially with the ready availability of digital photographic effects.
It may well be that crafty forgers could adequately duplicate the look of old
color offset printing by tweaking a modern image.
However, as far as I know, it is not possible to duplicate other printing
techniques such as stone litho and photogelatin on a microscopic level using
modern printers. The thing is that all printing techniques create artifacts
specific to the hardware used, if you look deep enough. As far as I know, the
only way you could possibly create an absolutely convincing fake of a stone
litho onesheet or a photogelatin lobby card would be to actually use those
techniques to make it. Does anyone (S2, etc) actually use manual lithographic
techniques for their reproductions? If they do, then yes, absolutely convincing
fakes could be created.
I also have to disagree with the notion that experienced collectors and dealers
somehow have a 'sixth sense' about movie paper, and can magically divine
whether a particular piece is authentic or not simply by some nebulous
combination of visual, manual, and olfactory inspection. Let's not forget how
many very experienced people have been flim-flammed with these Universal horror
pieces. And it seems to me that all this has come to light, not because of
anyone's superhuman forgery detection skills, but rather because too many
copies of the same things were appearing in the rarified world of high-end
horror collectors. If the perpetrators had been less greedy, and spaced all
this out over a much longer time period, I suspect this would have gone on for
many more years, with all these expensive worthless forgeries hanging on the
walls of the experts.
Randy
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