Thursday, October 15, 2009

Four Square

There is no shortage of oddities in what your webmeister considers the golden (1949-57) or silver (1966-72) ages of Topps, especially the latter. One such item is this 2x2 proof panel I have of 1967 Topps baseball cards printed on thin and extremely high quality paper:



The "cards" are standard sized but the bottom has a little extra to it. The reverse is pristine white (that blotch is some dirt it must have picked up along the way). It really is there, so keep scrolling:




Looks like the proverbial polar bear eating mashed potatoes in a snowstorm, doesn't it? That panel was once Woody Gelman's by the way.

I would think these were part of the proofing process. In later years (mid 70's) I know there are proof cards printed on ultra white cardboard but the process may not have been 100% refined in 1967 so Topps used high quality paper. I have seen a couple other 4 card panels like this over the years, so they are not exactly common.

1 comment:

Devon's First Cards - 1982 Topps said...

Proof paper... is that like, what they used to actually print the cards or just like something they printed off to see if the machine was printing right? I'm not really up on this kind of thing. It's pretty interesting though.