The Lost Art of Bus Passes

I always appreciate posts by the English stationery and ephemera shop Present & Correct, and share some of their visuals in my BlueSky roundups. They have a blog where they write up particularly interesting finds.

A recent one was a collection of weekly 1950s bus tickets from Milwaukee. Here are a few of them:

There are 30 tickets altogether, no two alike. 

Here are some thoughts about how the tickets would have been made.

Each one was printed in three ink colors. The large dates were hand-lettered, while the smaller words were set in metal type, likely either on a Linotype or Ludlow system, then printed to a proofing press. The proof type was cut out and pasted up with the hand lettering and other ornaments.

Each color had its own paste-up, possibly done as acetate overlays with the black on the bottom layer on illustration board. Registration marks were on each layer. The layers may have sometimes include rubylith for large areas of color.

Each layer was then shot with a large camera to make an offset printing plate, which was printed in one of the predetermined colors. Offset lithography was a common printing process by the 1950s, and was faster and cheaper for the type of long runs needed like these. These were probably sheet-fed, rather than web.

Why they used three colors instead of two or four, I don't know; I assume it was based on the press they ran on. Maybe it was a five-color press and they ran two passes at a time, with black ink common to both. Or if we could match up the dates of all the passes, we would find that two consecutive passes share one color in addition to black, and therefore could run on a four-color press. 

One additional detail to note: each ticket has an individual number added in the bottom right corner. So that's a final process the tickets went through before being distributed. I don't know why some of them have a letter A added and some don't.

It's clear these tickets were designed by the same person, and it was probably a major part of that person's job to create each one — from sketch to full design to final production and press check each week. 

All replaced by magnetic strips and barcodes.