The use of short prints and double prints by Topps in their vintage era has always sparked interest from collectors. Today will be the start of a series by Mark Pekrul looking at the 1957 to 1981 press sheets for the annual Topps Baseball sets. These have been studied here, sometimes in deep detail, sometimes not, by examining known uncut sheets, or portions of them, but never in this specific way. Mark, who posts as “deweyinthehall” on Net54 Baseball has dug into these along with a couple of other stalwarts over there and worked to reconstruct most of the print arrays for all Topps Baseball series from roughly 1955 to 1970. This work has essentially been compiled independently of anything I’ve posted previously. Here we go…
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As I began collecting baseball cards in 1978, it struck me
that while 726 seemed like a nice, sensible amount of cards to be contained in
a single set, 725 might have seemed even more sensible. As the years went by, and I learned that
older sets contained differing numbers of cards, I began to get confused – who
decided on 787? They couldn’t scrape up
another thirteen players and call it 800?
598, 609 – couldn’t they have (more or less) split the difference and
just made it 600?
A short time later, I learned about short-prints and
double-prints. What sort of quality
control did Topps have? How could some
cards be printed in greater or lesser quantities than others? Was anyone fired because of this?
It was only years later that I discovered the reason behind
all this: the press sheets.
From 1957 through 1995, all Topps standard-sized (i.e. 2.5 x
3.5 inches) sets (baseball, football, hockey, basketball and non-sports) were
printed on sheets containing two large blocks of cards, 11x12 cards each. Creating groups of 132 cards each, in many
cases this gave us complete set counts which are very recognizable today – 132,
264, 396, 528, 660 and 792. Some early
hockey and football sets, as well as many non-sports sets, had only 66 cards –
exactly half of 132.
By focusing on Baseball we can explore how the way press sheets were
arranged came to define how many cards were in a set (and even in each series
within a set) and why short- and double-prints became an unfortunate
necessity. This series will focus on the years 1957-1981, using 1981 more or less as an endpoint for
reasons which will be explained. Finally,
we will discuss the efforts of some to recreate how older sheets were arranged
to help answer questions which linger to this day.
When we hear the term “uncut sheet” today, we typically think of a roughly 2' x 4' sheet of 132 cards. However, a full standard-sized uncut sheet was twice as large, and included 2 groupings of 132 cards (as above). The margins were white (even for sets with colored borders, such as 1971 or 1962) and contained various notations including positioning and cutting guides and other errata. They eventually even featured commodity codes, just like Topps used for cases, boxes and packs.
Down the middle ran a thick white space called the “gutter” – full sheets were sliced down the gutter before each half-sheet, or ‘slit’, was then fed into a cutter.
Each slit contained 12 rows of 11 cards. For ease of reference, we can label the rows A-L and columns 1-11. Any card position can then be designated as A-1 (far upper left), L-11 (bottom right), and so forth.
In many cases, we have examples of even very old full- and half-sheets where we can see exactly how cards from any given series or set were arranged. In other cases, no images exist, but careful review of miscuts, where portions of adjoining cards can be seen, can help us reconstruct what the press sheets looked like with close to 100% accuracy.
With very few exceptions, cards in any given row are
fixed. In other words, if one row of a particular set or series contained 11 known cards left to right, those
cards would always appear in those positions on every sheet from which they
were cut. As we will see, the
arrangement of those rows vertically often changed based on the total number of
cards in the set or series. Therefore,
it is possible to find two miscuts of the same card, each featuring a different
card above or beneath.
Even so, for many years, series with both 88 and 66 cards were always
arranged in the same fashion.
88-card series always featured a row pattern ensuring each
card appeared three times across a full sheet (the “88-card pattern”):
Slit A: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, A, B, C, D
Slit B: E, F, G, H, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H
66-card series always featured a row pattern which ensured
each card appeared four times (the “66-card pattern”):
Slit A: A, B, C, D, E, F, A, B, C, D, E, F
Slit B: A, B, C, D, E, F, A, B, C, D, E, F
Now that we’ve discussed the general lay-out of Topps
sheets, let’s take a look at each set to see how it all played out in practice,
why sets had the number of cards they did, and why certain cards wound up in
greater or lesser abundance than others.
NOTE: The “library” of actual sheet and slit images is very spotty until the late 1960s. What follows will occasionally reference “images”, which means we have an actual image, or “reconstructions”, which means we have pieced together what the sheet or slit looked like by examining partial half-sheets, miscut cards and card counts at sites like eBay. An ongoing effort to reconstruct what vintage sheets and slits looked like can be observed here: Net54 Baseball 1955-1970 Topps Virtual Sheets, and help is always welcome.
1957 Topps Baseball – 407 Total Cards in Set
Series 1: 1-88, 88 different cards
Series 2: 89-176, 88 different cards
Series 3: 177-264, 88 different cards
Series 4: 265-352, 88 different cards
Series 5: 353-407, 55 different cards
Why only 88 cards for those first four series? Throughout the years, Topps often kept their
series at less than the maximum 132 cards permitted by their printing
arrangement. With only 16 clubs, 25
cards per team would place the set at 400 cards. They also wanted to ensure
they had enough series “flow” to keep kids coming back and buying new cards all
throughout the year.
Series 1-4 were arranged in the typical 88-card series
fashion outlined above as revealed on these series 2 slit images. The cards in rows A-D and I-L on one slit
appear in rows E-H on the other.
Then there’s series 5, with only 55 cards. As they would until
1972, late and particularly final series always contained fewer cards than
earlier series. Again, it was a
marketing decision. These series would
debut late in the baseball season, when interest was waning as kids turned
their attention to football and other things.
So, a series 5 full sheet in 1957 would run:
Slit A: Rows A, B, C, D, E, A, B, C, D, E, A, B
Slit B: Rows B, C, D, E, A, D, E, A, B, C, D, E
55 different cards creates only 5 different rows. With 24 total rows in a full sheet, this
means one row had to be printed one time less than the others. In series 5, this was row C, which appears 4
times when all the others appear 5 times.
Therefore, the 11 cards in row C appear 1/5 less than the cards in the other
rows, creating a situation where these 11 cards are short-printed.
The series 5 full sheet has been reconstructed, revealing
the following pattern:
According to the work done at Net54, it is a near certainty that the cards which are SPs, row C, are (left to right):
When we continue, Mark will examine the 1958-1960 sheets.
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