Checking Out

We're going to round out the unnumbered checklists today with a quick look at the one from 1957 Topps Football. It's a bit more colorful than the ones found with '57 baseball:



The big Beckett Football Guide also mentions a variety with white instead of yellow background and states it is equal in supply to the yellow version but my quick, unscientific search of Ebay (from whence all these scans came) and Google last night only turned up a dozen or so of the yellow type. Can anyone (I mean you Doug!) provide verification of the white version?

The backs (and there are two, one for each main type of Topps bubble gum at the time) have a more finished look than the reverses of the '57 baseball checklists:





Same ads as the baseball! The Blony connection makes some real sense here as Topps borrowed one of the proposed designs for 1956 Bowman baseball cards in composing the 1957 football cards. Here is a '57 FB for comparison:



Printed on the now standard 132 card half sheets, the first series had 88 cards and the last 66, for a grand total of 154. Beckett indicates 22 double prints in the second series, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a 66 card print run usually means all cards are printed equally. That is a story for another day though.