'68 = Great

Fresh in from the wilds of the 'bay is this neat Card Collectors Company catalog dated January 15, 1968 (their 20th!), clocking in at a fairly hefty ten pages.  Before the internet and before or just around the birth of the modern card show, Card Collectors Co enticed collectors with mail order goodness. So let's take a peek, realizing that there will be some repetition with their 1965 catalog shown here recently.

 Red and Blue Backs but no sets of the Reds? The last reference is to a Reds Team Card. Odd that there were only Blue Back sets though.  And a complete run of '52 highs for $90?  Sold!  An just an eight cent difference twixt the low and high numbers in 1953.  1954 lows (#1-50)were two cents less than the rest of the 54's.  No surprises in 1955 but those Baseball Buttons look like a steal at five for a quarter, even if Woody got to pick them himself.

Here's an expected development-nos. 265 to 352 are described as "extremely scarce."  In 1958 the four cards pulled to make way for extra prints of the Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle All Star cards (nos. 443, 446, 450 and 462) carry a premium of nineteen cents compared to six cents for a common.  1959 and '60 are ho-hum and there is barely a premium for 1961 highs, which are pretty tough. No premium at all for highs from 1962-66.

1967 brings no hint of the short print mania that was to come and Bazooka cards seem to be a mix of panels and singles.  Of interest are the 1967 Red Sox and Pirates Stickers, sold as a combined set of 66 for $2.95 plus P&H.  Those are described as "Very scarce!" And for a mere $1.50 you could have a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie all to yourself!  The Black & White 53's go for ten cents more then the Color cards and there is no 1954 Bowman Ted Williams

Page four is a real hodgepodge and you will note only the first series of 1960 Leaf cards are available, both could be had three years earlier.

Football?  You bet!  They get the year wrong but there are some 1951 Magic Football singles and 1952 Bowman Large cards are cheaper than the small ones (were it so today)!  Bowman Football sets are either early (1948 and 1950) or late (1955). I suspect the smaller, earlier cards were not as popular and we all know what happened in 1955 and Bowman may have been left with a lot of unsold gridiron product as a result. We also get Hockey cards from 1955 (the 1954-55 set) which seemingly confirms some of these were sold in the U.S.  Parkies, CFL and T206 cards could be purchased for nominal prices along with an adjustable baseball ring!

Larger cards abound on page 6 but supplies of 1959 Bazooka Baseball are dwindling so you better act fast!

Can you imagine buying up all those old scorecards?  Yowsers!

The Pot Luck page shows supplies of certain issues that were abundant three years earlier were running out, although some of the sets featured could still be bought fully formed two pages hence.

I believe that would be the hardcover version of the 1960 American Card Catalog available for $4.25 but there was a paperback reprint made in 1967 that surprisingly is not for sale.  Those Topps Trading Card Guild Albums for sixty cents apiece seem like a good deal as well.

And so we come to the end.  I guess if you didn't have at least 75 cents you were out of luck....