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Updated 16 July 2021: Added a scan of a copy of the printed strip as it appeared in a newspaper that I purchased off eBay.

As regular readers of this blog know, I love flong. (If you don’t know, here’s an introduction and a history.) I’m always on the lookout for unique flongs that help illustrate aspects of printing history. Despite likely 99.999% of all flongs being burned or discarded after use or because they were remade due to errors, judging by eBay and other sources, a substantial number survive. And, clearly, some people working at newspapers tucked away flongs (and less often stereotypes, the lead alloy metal plates made from them) thinking they would have future interest—or value.

Recently, I purchased a four-color separation of a Sunday Peanuts comic from Nov. 27, 1977. Standard color printing requires separating photographs and illustrations into the three complementary colors—cyan for blue, magenta for red, and yellow—plus a “key” color, which is black. (This is known as CMYK printing, required for reflected like, as opposed to video displays, which use the primary colors of reg, green, and blue for emitted light.)

I had never seen a flong separation before and this one is in quite excellent shape. It had made its way to Sweden, but judging from the copyright notice and language used, it’s a flong intended to appear in an English-language paper, almost certainly in the United States. Outside of the black (key or K) flong, the others have written in areas that wouldn’t be printed the color for each.

You can see the original strip at its official source, GoComics, but oddly only in black and white. A Google Books digitization of a Peanuts collection has the full-color glory. Higher-resolution photos of the images are in this Flickr gallery.

A useful note in examining flongs: they are right-reading, as they are pressed from an original raised plate. However, the low points (the debossed areas) are what fills with lead when these are cast to protect a mirror-image plate used for printing. So while these are not reversed—you’re seeing them as they exist—it can be hard to parse what the final result looks like. I’ll be experimenting with lighting and Photoshop to see if I can “reverse out” a flong into what a printed piece might have looked like.

Below that is a printed copy that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s terrible. You can see what the last days of relief printing looked like for newspapers with that one page. It wasn’t long after that flongs, stereotypes, and relief printing were thrown into the waste bin of history.