Topps Topics: Studies in Uncut Sheet Arrays - Introduction and 1957

The use of short prints and double prints by Topps in their vintage era has always sparked interest from collectors.  Today will be the start of a series by Mark Pekrul looking at the 1957 to 1981 press sheets for the annual Topps Baseball sets. These have been studied here, sometimes in deep detail, sometimes not, by examining known uncut sheets, or portions of them, but never in this specific way. Mark, who posts as “deweyinthehall” on Net54 Baseball  has dug into these along with a couple of other stalwarts over there and worked to reconstruct most of the print arrays for all Topps Baseball series from roughly 1955 to 1970.  This work has essentially been compiled independently of anything I’ve posted previously. Here we go…

----

As I began collecting baseball cards in 1978, it struck me that while 726 seemed like a nice, sensible amount of cards to be contained in a single set, 725 might have seemed even more sensible.  As the years went by, and I learned that older sets contained differing numbers of cards, I began to get confused – who decided on 787?  They couldn’t scrape up another thirteen players and call it 800?  598, 609 – couldn’t they have (more or less) split the difference and just made it 600? 

A short time later, I learned about short-prints and double-prints.  What sort of quality control did Topps have?  How could some cards be printed in greater or lesser quantities than others?  Was anyone fired because of this?

It was only years later that I discovered the reason behind all this: the press sheets. 

From 1957 through 1995, all Topps standard-sized (i.e. 2.5 x 3.5 inches) sets (baseball, football, hockey, basketball and non-sports) were printed on sheets containing two large blocks of cards, 11x12 cards each.  Creating groups of 132 cards each, in many cases this gave us complete set counts which are very recognizable today – 132, 264, 396, 528, 660 and 792.  Some early hockey and football sets, as well as many non-sports sets, had only 66 cards – exactly half of 132.

By focusing on Baseball we can explore how the way press sheets were arranged came to define how many cards were in a set (and even in each series within a set) and why short- and double-prints became an unfortunate necessity.  This series will focus on the years 1957-1981, using 1981 more or less as an endpoint for reasons which will be explained.  Finally, we will discuss the efforts of some to recreate how older sheets were arranged to help answer questions which linger to this day.

When we hear the term “uncut sheet” today, we typically think of a roughly 2' x 4' sheet of 132 cards. However, a full standard-sized uncut sheet was twice as large, and included 2 groupings of 132 cards (as above).  The margins were white (even for sets with colored borders, such as 1971 or 1962) and contained various notations including positioning and cutting guides and other errata.  They eventually even featured commodity codes, just like Topps used for cases, boxes and packs.

Down the middle ran a thick white space called the “gutter” – full sheets were sliced down the gutter before each half-sheet, or ‘slit’, was then fed into a cutter. 

Each slit contained 12 rows of 11 cards.   For ease of reference, we can label the rows A-L and columns 1-11. Any card position can then be designated as A-1 (far upper left), L-11 (bottom right), and so forth.

             SLIT A                                                                      SLIT B

In many cases, we have examples of even very old full- and half-sheets where we can see exactly how cards from any given series or set were arranged.  In other cases, no images exist, but careful review of miscuts, where portions of adjoining cards can be seen, can help us reconstruct what the press sheets looked like with close to 100% accuracy.

With very few exceptions, cards in any given row are fixed.  In other words, if one row of a particular set or series contained 11 known cards left to right, those cards would always appear in those positions on every sheet from which they were cut.  As we will see, the arrangement of those rows vertically often changed based on the total number of cards in the set or series.  Therefore, it is possible to find two miscuts of the same card, each featuring a different card above or beneath.

Even so, for many years, series with both 88 and 66 cards were always arranged in the same fashion. 

88-card series always featured a row pattern ensuring each card appeared three times across a full sheet (the “88-card pattern”):

Slit A: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, A, B, C, D

Slit B: E, F, G, H, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H

66-card series always featured a row pattern which ensured each card appeared four times (the “66-card pattern”):

Slit A: A, B, C, D, E, F, A, B, C, D, E, F

Slit B: A, B, C, D, E, F, A, B, C, D, E, F

Now that we’ve discussed the general lay-out of Topps sheets, let’s take a look at each set to see how it all played out in practice, why sets had the number of cards they did, and why certain cards wound up in greater or lesser abundance than others.

NOTE: The “library” of actual sheet and slit images is very spotty until the late 1960s.  What follows will occasionally reference “images”, which means we have an actual image, or “reconstructions”, which means we have pieced together what the sheet or slit looked like by examining partial half-sheets, miscut cards and card counts at sites like eBay.   An ongoing effort to reconstruct what vintage sheets and slits looked like can be observed here: Net54 Baseball 1955-1970 Topps Virtual Sheets, and help is always welcome.  

1957 Topps Baseball – 407 Total Cards in Set

Series 1: 1-88, 88 different cards

Series 2: 89-176, 88 different cards

Series 3: 177-264, 88 different cards

Series 4: 265-352, 88 different cards

Series 5: 353-407, 55 different cards

Why only 88 cards for those first four series?  Throughout the years, Topps often kept their series at less than the maximum 132 cards permitted by their printing arrangement.  With only 16 clubs, 25 cards per team would place the set at 400 cards. They also wanted to ensure they had enough series “flow” to keep kids coming back and buying new cards all throughout the year. 

Series 1-4 were arranged in the typical 88-card series fashion outlined above as revealed on these series 2 slit images.  The cards in rows A-D and I-L on one slit appear in rows E-H on the other.

            

Then there’s series 5, with only 55 cards.  As they would until 1972, late and particularly final series always contained fewer cards than earlier series.  Again, it was a marketing decision.  These series would debut late in the baseball season, when interest was waning as kids turned their attention to football and other things.

So, a series 5 full sheet in 1957 would run:

Slit A: Rows A, B, C, D, E, A, B, C, D, E, A, B

Slit B: Rows B, C, D, E, A, D, E, A, B, C, D, E

55 different cards creates only 5 different rows.  With 24 total rows in a full sheet, this means one row had to be printed one time less than the others.  In series 5, this was row C, which appears 4 times when all the others appear 5 times.  Therefore, the 11 cards in row C appear 1/5 less than the cards in the other rows, creating a situation where these 11 cards are short-printed. 

The series 5 full sheet has been reconstructed, revealing the following pattern:

According to the work done at Net54, it is a near certainty that the cards which are SPs, row C, are (left to right):

391 Ralph Terry

365 Ossie Virgil

375 Jim Landis

390 Reno Bertoia

357 Earl Torgesen

405 Duke Maas

403 Dick Hyde

362 Roman Mejias

398 Al Cicotte

407 Yankees Power Hitters

406 Bob Hale

When we continue, Mark will examine the 1958-1960 sheets. 

Simply Splendid

So I was tooling around eBay last week when I noticed a very interesting player ledger kept by Topps back in the pre-digital days.  This one knocked my (Red) Sox off almost immediately:

As far as 1950's Topps hoped-for star power went, Williams was about as impressive a get as you could wish for at Bush Terminal. You will note the main section of the ledger starts in 1957, which at first struck me as odd since Ted famously kicked of with Topps in 1954 as the alpha and omega of that set after signing with the boys from Brooklyn. 

You can see Ted was signed at the end of December 1953 which totally tracks.  He had a five-year deal, which also tracks, as his last appearance with Topps as a player was in the 1958 set and he was off to Fleer for 1959.  Before that, he was in a real potpourri of issues starting with his 1939 Play Ball card and an R303-A Goudey premium. National releasers Bowman snagged him in 1951 but not in 1952, when he was appearing in the muddy looking Berk Ross set, the more colorful Red Man tobacco offering and on some Star Cal decals (a highly underrated set IMHO). He ended up being recalled by the Marines by the end of April '52 and then was a no show in terms of 1953 cards, except as part of the also underrated Canadian Exhibit set due to a late July mustering out. Topps then snapped him up.

However, a closer look at the upper right corner reveals the story there, and then some. Here, I blew it up for easier eyeballing:

Take a look at the box under SIGNED (K); Ted's Topps deal was arranged through his agent, F.J. Corcoran. Whatever deal Corcoran worked out with Topps must have been exclusive for gum cards and ultimately led to two Jimmy Piersall cards and and no "official" Williams cards for Bowman in 1954, although they certainly sold off what they could in packs once ceased-and-desisted. Corcoran can be considered the one of the first true sports agents - possibly even the first - coming to it through the world of golf, a sport with which Williams was well acquainted. We'll come back to him shortly. 

Those five years with Topps saw The Kid lead off three sets (1954, 1957 and 1958) and his time with them was his longest sustained run with any card company. It's also worth noting (again) Williams doesn't have a line entry on the ledger until 1957, when he received $450 from Topps, a significant premium compared to the standard amount of roughly $125 other players made.  Although they had a rudimentary system in place already, 1957 was the first year Topps prepared a merchandise catalog for their ballplayers to choose from if they didn't take the offered cash stipend. Ted would be back with Topps as a manager in 1969 but as you can see, he was getting the standard $250 per season for a new contract in effect at that time upon his return, plus the standard $5 in "steak money" for signing. He took the merch thereafter.

Somewhat, but not completely, surprisingly, there was a bit of a wrinkle to all this, namely this letter forwarded by friend o'the Archive Tony DeMarzio, which was sent by Sy Berger to Corcoran memorializing an extension for Williams for 1958. Maybe the ledger card was only created just around that time, or maybe something else was at play, like an option in the original deal. The October 1st date may be significant as the championship season, which may have been how the original agreement referenced duration, ended on September 29th, with the World Series to follow:

As for F.J. Corcoran, he had several other famous baseball players as clients.  Of particular interest is Stan Musial, another ballplayer whose past reveals a wide range of regional issues and some on the national stage, capped by a 1953 Bowman card. Stan the Man signed a deal and joined up with Topps around the time Williams was exiting in late 1958, only appearing on an All Star card in the nosebleed section. Topps was so excited, they tripled their fun:

(Courtesy Heritage Auctions)

Musial would have Topps cards every year thereafter until he retired following the 1963 season; given the probable July-ish production date for the '58 highs, he seems like a signee whose previous exclusive contract (with Rawlings, I believe) had just expired. I wonder if he too got a long term deal?

An old auction lot had some enlightening Musial correspondence with Corcoran circa 1950:

(Courtesy RR Auction)

An interesting comment within those letters concerned Stan returning a 1950 Bowman contract unsigned, via a letter dated February 26, 1950 . That changed of course but you can also see the Rawlings deal was his most lucrative at the time. He did OK with Wheaties too, and an outfit called Palm Beach (maybe the Florida town?):

I'd really like to track down Musial's Topps player ledger and also dive into his deals via Corcoran, I'll start digging in earnest soon.

1952 In View

Friend o'the Archive Pete Putman recently sent along some very cool and interesting things related to the 1952 Topps Baseball set. With Spring Training kicking off for real right about now, what better time to take a look?

This first one is a bit of a question mark actually, although it was attributed to the 1952 set by Jim Fleck, who was Levi Bleam's (707 Sportscards) business partner until he passed away in 2020. This obviously never came to pass but it would have been something had it been manufactured:

It's unlike the plainly covered small albums Topps offered as premiums for their 1948-49 Hocus Focus (aka Magic Photo) and X-Ray Roundup (aka Pixie) cards and certainly not the same beast as their circa 1958-62 larger premium albums. If anyone knows more about this, I'd love to hear from you.

Pete sent along some print oddities as well.  Here's Gus Zernial, with no black ink on the back:

This is the ghostly reverse:

The star looks like it was hand drawn, doesn't it? Here's a Spahn as well, just for high-kickin' fun:

Finally, here are two very noticeable color variants for Ray Boone.  The first is from the black back run:

While his red back has turned orange!

There can be gradations in these colors on each Boone as well.

There are many, many print anomalies in first series of the 1952 set; it almost seems like the color separations were redone as Topps flipped the backs from black to red. I'm hoping that one of the larger, in-depth projects I understand are presently being worked on by some hobbyists will eventually get around to showing them all, plus all the other variants within. If you study the 1952 Baseball set in depth, the colors and designs used on the fronts, especially in the first three series, it's a pretty wild ride.

Fours Field

The last time I took a peek at the "1960" Topps Venezuelan Tattoo set, I was marveling at a page from the 1989 Topps Auction at Guernsey's, where a number of potential subjects were included in a lot of original tattoo art, finally noticed by yours truly only 35 years later. Well since then four additional subjects have turned up and expanded the checklist to 25 players.  One of the new subjects hails from the Guernsey's sheet and three appear in the U.S. Baseball Tattoo set, including a real barnburner.

Tony Taylor is our new Venezuelan-only subject, once inferred and now confirmed:

Taylor, a Cuban National, brings the number of possible subjects from the Guernsey's artwork that were likely produced down to nine.

Here is a wrecked Glen Hobbie:

Vernon Law, a key member of the 1960 Pirates squad that shocked the mighty Yankees has survived in far better shape than ol' Glen:

Those three were offered on eBay, along with a couple other previously known subjects.  Heritage Auctions ended up with the big fish though, as the Mick has finally been found:

Mantle was another subject that was previously theorized to be included due to his widespread fame. It's not in great shape but I'll bet it goes for some crazy money when the auction concludes three weeks hence.

Here's the current checklist.  Since the set was produced in such a way that the final count should be divisible by 4/8/24, and factoring in the nine Venezuelan only subjects still lurking to presently land us at 33, it's clear more subjects are out there, and, as I suspect the divisor is likely to be 24, we could get all the way to 48 players.

Bob Allison
Ruben Amaro (Venezuelan only)
Luis Arroyo (Venezuelan only)
Orlando Cepeda (US subject but redrawn for Venezuala)
Bob Clemente (Venezuelan only)
Rocky Colavito
Don Drysdale
Nellie Fox
Tony Gonzales (Venezuelan only)
Dick Groat
Glen Hobbie
Harmon Killebrew
Juan Marichal  (Venezuelan only)
Frank Lary
Vernon Law
Mickey Mantle
Ed Mathews
Stan Musial
Juan Pizzaro (Venezuelan only)
Vic Power (Venezuelan only)
Pedro Ramos (Venezuelan only)
Tony Taylor (Venezuelan only)
Zoilo Versalles (Venezuelan only) inferred from a sliver on a miscut, not yet confirmed but it's somebody
Gene Woodling
Early Wynn

Here's the likely Venezuelan players not yet found:

Matty Alou
Luis Aparicio (previously surmised as a possible subject)
Chico Fernandez
Felipe Alou
"Clio" (Elio) Chacon
Felix Mantilla
O. "Cepida"
Jose Pagan
Chico Cardenas

If we could confirm the US version print group includes all the non-exclusive players found so far in the Venezuelan set, it might help finding the resting point. In fact, the redrawn Cepeda could indicate he was not in the same print group as other known US subjects. Right now we know of eleven Venezuelan only subjects with another nine possible from the Guernsey's sheet. Four more gets us to 24.

The "US" subjects presently total fourteen, so another ten of those could be out there. If I'm correct in my guesstimating, of course.

Woody Gelman

 

As per my last post, I've been working on a biography of Topps executive, Nostalgia Press publisher and card collector extraordinaire Woody Gelman for the last five years. I'm about 75% of the way through the initial draft and looking to fill in some gaps beyond the documentation I've found so far, which is fairly widespread and pretty deep at this point. 

If anyone has access to the following, essentially physical documents or facsimiles of them, well outside what's commonly seen on the web (forums, blogs, sites, etc.), please e-mail me at cfireside at Gmail dot com. I don't need the originals but will need good copies. 

1. Correspondence to/from Gelman, especially related to the 1953 and 1960/1967 ACC's and also Nostalgia Press.
2. Anything related to Solomon & Gelman art service other than small ads.
3. Original art by Gelman.
4. Card Collectors Bulletin, Hobbies or other Hobby Pub references to (or articles/letters by) Gelman that are NOT from SCD, TTS, BCN, BHN or The Wrapper. (I have some CCB and Hobbies bits, but they are scattershot).
5. Correspondence to/from Bhob Stewart concerning Topps and/or Nostalgia Press (not necessarily with Gelman).
6. Card Collectors Co. Price Lists: 1966, 1969, 1970, and 1973 through 1987.
7. Card Collectors Co. Supplemental Price Lists: any through 1987.
8. Sam Rosen Catalogs and Price Lists: any.
9. The Card Collector Newsletter issues: 12,13,14,15,36,38. 
10. Topps items specific to Gelman (NOT issued cards or the Topps reference binders), more like oddball mockups, sketches or cartoons.
11. Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios related ephemera concerning Gelman or Ben Solomon (1938-45). (I have what I believe is 99% of it, but you never know.)
12. Interviews or audio with Gelman, possibly/likely unpublished (I believe I have the only published interviews in existence, but no audio of anything).
13. Foreign interviews or articles about Gelman, especially from France and the UK.
14. Unpublished interviews with or correspondence by Len Brown concerning Gelman.
15. Ephemera from Nostalgia Press and Card Collectors Company (letterheads, ads, mailers etc.), especially ones that show illustrations.
16. Any Woody Gelman business cards.

Thanks one and all!

Highly Irregular

Not really a blog post today, more of an update.  

I've decided to pause the weekly entries, at least for the time being, and move into a cycle of posting only when interesting or new things pop up. This is not health related or anything like that, it's simply a matter of too many things going on, with not enough available hours to properly attend to them. I am wrapped up in three large hobby projects at the moment, two of which are collaborations, with a fourth planned, and feel the quality of the blog has noticeably slipped over the past year or so.  There's been a lot of unforced errors and too many auctions mined of late, which is not really how I envision things should be here. I've been doing this for a long time (this is my 1,160th entry) and still enjoy it and plan to continue, but the finding the time required to properly deploy each post on a weekly basis has been very difficult of late. A long range goal here was/is to have at least one post, highly detailed (or not) for each and every set Topps issued at retail from 1948-80. I'm still hoping to do that but the timetable will be a little less compressed now.

This blog started when I thought a proper, serious look at the history of Topps was sorely needed. I was inspired by Jon Helfenstein's wonderful Fleer Sticker Project and had recently embarked upon my quest to obtain a type card example from all the Topps issues through 1980 when I kicked things off. Originally I only intended to collect and post about Baseball issues but that changed quickly enough as my interests expanded once I realized you had to examine the totality of what Topps was doing to make any sense of it all.  Focusing on a single genre did not allow for that. 

There had been so much incorrect information disseminated in the hobby about the company and its myriad releases that it sometimes seemed like what was out there was as highly fictionalized as a novel, with little based upon fact. A large part of that was due to Topps itself and the way they used mostly made-up PR to ever-so-carefully reveal their story. At the same time they maintained almost no cohesive corporate records beyond those kept by Woody Gelman and Ben Solomon in the New Product and Art Departments; archives long since disseminated or lost. A lot of hearsay and guesswork was spread in old hobby papers and now, of course, we have the massive online hobby community that often seems like it helps those old, wayward narratives much more than it hurts them. I've tried to address the conventional hobby wisdom where needed (as best I could) and hope I've somewhat succeeded in clarifying some of that.

I've learned so much from writing this blog and it's led me to people and places I never thought possible to meet or visit. The dedicated reader base is here is small but mighty and the contributions of images and information many of you have sent to me over the years has been heartening. Please, please keep sending me these images and information!

So stay tuned, there is definitely more to come, still on Saturday at 8 AM Eastern, just a little more spread out going forward, so exactly which Saturdays is TBD, as is when the next post will appear, although it should be some time in January. I'll get into my various projects down the road but can offer way-too-minimal details on the biggest one, which is a biography of Woody Gelman I have been researching and writing for five-plus years now.  The initial draft is finally closing in on completion and a hoped-for artwork-enhanced-book makes it one of the collaborations I mentioned above. There's a lot more under the hood there, but for now that's all the news that fits...

...well, except for this little gem - a Bill Gallo cartoon Dick Young inserted into his New York Daily News column in 1965 after Topps prevailed in their federal anti-trust case; it seems a fitting way to end the year:

Flag Day

Longtime readers here may recall that about eight years ago I took a look at the some of the later Flags of the World sets sporadically issued by Topps over more than two decades. If you refer back to that post, you will see Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins had some personal experience with one of the test issues Topps created when they wanted to issue an updated version of their Giant Size, colorful and classic 1956 Flags set.  

Prior to the 1970 Flags of the World "sticker" set seeing release, they tested the concept using either reprinted or leftover cards from the 1956 set.  These were inserted into a small envelope, which was needed as the older cards were larger than the standard 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" in use at the time; there was also a piece of play money in each pack that required folding  to fit, just like the oversized inserts for the 1968 Basketball test. The currency was a new sweetener, the 1956 set did not have any inserts and Topps really didn't come around to the concept until 1960 anyway. The Flags test looks like it happened in 1969, or at least that's the best guess on timing.

Here's the envelope (ignore the numbering added after the fact by a third party and which is unrelated to any part of the test), in better resolution than the one I showed eight years ago:

Way back in 2017, Lonnie advised:

"The card numbers were for the original 1956 Flags of the World set, which were the cards contained in the envelopes. My memory is not that good, but I think I had close to 2/3rds of the complete set. They were Indistinguishable from the original '56 cards, so no good way to tell they were test cards other than I knew they came from the envelopes. My theory is Topps was actually testing the "money" insert idea, not the cards themselves, and probably used either left over proof sheets (would have only taken 2 or 3 sheets to fill a couple of boxes) they had in archive, or did a small print run from the '56 films. I guess the '70 Flags of the World cards themselves either were not in development yet or not ready for testing. Using the '56 cards, which were over-sized compared to the modern standard, is why I believe they used an envelope instead of a plain wax wrapper; their wrapping machines could not handle the larger cards.... My theory is that Topps only used the envelopes for over-sized or odd-shaped items that could not be wrapped on their machines."

Unless there's thinner 56's out there, I lean toward old overstock being used.  Even if Topps had none of the actual 1956 cards on hand, Woody Gelman's Card Collectors Company would have been able to assist with minty fresh cards. The play money did indeed look real, and was not limited to a single size either:

Flipsided:

The story, as noted by Lonnie, that the test currency was too realistic looking. Based upon this 1963 Un Guarini from Paraguay, I would have to agree, especially on the obverse:

(Real Paraguayan Currency)

Topps corrected this problem for the 1970 full retail release, as they prominently indicated NON-NEGOTIABLE on each piece of play money:

They also made it clear that, in addition to the added NON-NEGOTIABLE line, the currency was not issued by an actual country. "Triniday and Lobags" sounds like a nice place to visit though!

You can see they were each folded before pack insertion; Topps also did this with the How To Play Better Basketball inserts that came in the 1968 test Basketball envelopes. The 1970 currency is somewhat difficult to track down and I suspect it's because the wet and stick approach the the Flags set proper was not popular with the kids, resulting in poor sales. Thinking about it, why even make them stickers, let alone low-tech ones?

As always, be careful with your money!