1952 In View

Friend o'the Archive Pete Putman recently sent along some very cool and interesting things related to the 1952 Topps Baseball set. With Spring Training kicking off for real right about now, what better time to take a look?

This first one is a bit of a question mark actually, although it was attributed to the 1952 set by Jim Fleck, who was Levi Bleam's (707 Sportscards) business partner until he passed away in 2020. This obviously never came to pass but it would have been something had it been manufactured:

It's unlike the plainly covered small albums Topps offered as premiums for their 1948-49 Hocus Focus (aka Magic Photo) and X-Ray Roundup (aka Pixie) cards and certainly not the same beast as their circa 1958-62 larger premium albums. If anyone knows more about this, I'd love to hear from you.

Pete sent along some print oddities as well.  Here's Gus Zernial, with no black ink on the back:

This is the ghostly reverse:

The star looks like it was hand drawn, doesn't it? Here's a Spahn as well, just for high-kickin' fun:

Finally, here are two very noticeable color variants for Ray Boone.  The first is from the black back run:

While his red back has turned orange!

There can be gradations in these colors on each Boone as well.

There are many, many print anomalies in first series of the 1952 set; it almost seems like the color separations were redone as Topps flipped the backs from black to red. I'm hoping that one of the larger, in-depth projects I understand are presently being worked on by some hobbyists will eventually get around to showing them all, plus all the other variants within. If you study the 1952 Baseball set in depth, the colors and designs used on the fronts, especially in the first three series, it's a pretty wild ride.