A Series Of Fortunate Events

We're half a day early as I screwed up my scheduling of posts!

There's a really good thread going on over at Net54baseball.com about the 1963 Topps Baseball set and how the series stack up SP and DP-wise.  I won't immediately ruin for you, here's the linky dink.

While we are on the subject, here is a 4th series half sheet from '63, a thing of beauty:

It's a great set to study as the color scheme of the cards made it necessary to invert half of them to facilitate printing; the inset circles also are symbiotically tied to the main color at the bottom of the card as well.  This, coupled with the Topps practice of pushing the next series checklist onto the current sheets made for an interesting observation or five by the Original Poster, one Kevvyg1026.

Herewith the executive summary:

• The idea that the last (7th)  series started at #523 is incorrect

• The idea that there are short prints in the last series is also incorrect.

• The idea that short prints could occur in anything other than multiples off 11  is wrong (we already knew this here at the blog)

• For whatever reason, there is one subset of 11 cards that were "extra prints" in the 5th series. Other than the 1st series, which traditionally held 110 cards (109 plus an extra checklist) in this era, the rest of the series work out to either three impressions of each card over a full 264 card sheet (series of 87+1 extra checklist=88) or four (series of 65 + extra checklist=66) except for the 5th which has 77 (76+1) cards.  For some reason a row was double-printed in this series. Those 60's Topps 1st series runs usually had 22 extra card per half sheet, but the quantities were so high you can't tell the SP's from the DP's.

Here's the likely series breakdown (you would need the sheets to be 100% confident), kudos to Kevvyg1026 for figuring all of this out:

Series 1: 1-109 (110 cards incl. extra checklist)
Series 2: 110-196 (88 cards, ditto)
Series 3: 197-283 (88 cards, ditto)
Series 4: 284-370 (88 cards ditto)
Series 5: 371-446 (77 cards, ditto)
Series 6: 447-511 (66 cards, ditto)
Series 7: 512-576 (66 cards, ditto)

These won't actually match the series configuration son the printed checklists by the way:

Series 1: 1-88
Series 2: 89-176
Series 3: 177-264
Series 4: 265-352
Series 5: 353-429
Series 6: 430-506
Series 7: 507-576