Hit The Road Stack

I've sung the praises of the 1953-54 Topps World On Wheels set before so when I was browsing the Heritage Auctions website the other day I was pleasantly surprised by a small stack of original art from the set.  Twenty four subjects were saved from the bowels of Bush Terminal at some point, probably before the 1989 Topps Guernsey's auction of original Topps artwork as my attempts to match these 24 with the 148 offered in 1989 didn't seem to match up. It's a little hard to tell with the antique auto subjects though, which make up the majority of the Heritage offering but if there are truly no duplicated subjects, then 172 of the 180 subjects have surviving artwork that's been identified.

The Guernsey catalog has a brief summary of the artwork and indicates it was all original illustration.  It's all uniformly outstanding:

Like I said, there are a lot of antique autos, one of which (fourth down on left) looks like the background color block has been inserted.  It hasn't though, as the actual card shows:

I like the lonely little VW Bug below:

None of this artwork solves the mystery of the "high high numbers" in the set, running from nos. 171-180 and which are of a slightly different composition than the previously 170 cards. The distribution method of these last 10 cards is also a bit of a mystery, as is the fact they can be found with red or blue backs, when all 170 that came before were red.