The Ring's The Thing (Unless It's Not)

Not too long ago I took a look at Bowman's attempt to launch a baseball themed comic in the early days of 1948. As we've seen, Roger The Rookie Dodger sure seems like a precursor to that year's far more familiar Baseball set and the trio of other sets they released that year (Football, Basketball, and Movie Stars).

The 1948 Bowman Baseball set was the first major national release to commemorate the sport since 1941, although it seems to get very little hobby love today, possibly due to the black-and-white photos used across its 48 cards (nice symmetry there, eh?). Another problem may be that the vintage Bowman brand is not quite the shiny, rookie-laden thing it became once Topps reintroduced it three decades or so after they had snuffed it out.

That popularity problem is related to its key HOF rookies, or more precisely, lack thereof, as many of Bowman's 1948 subjects featured players who had already seen cards issued before the war started. While the entire rookie card support structure that was endlessly parsed in the 1980's stipulated the need for a nationally distributed set to attain such recognition, I'm not so sure the hobby at large agrees with that sentiment anymore and it doesn't work for anything but a handful of sets issued before 1933 anyway. I've always thought these gymnastics were a ploy by the major hobby publications back then to underpin their biggest advertisers and have seen nothing to really change my mind in the many years since I first picked up the premiere issue of Baseball Cards magazine back in 1981. I digress, but will re-digress momentarily.

The 1948 Bowman's feature fairly crisp photography:

The cards are almost square at 2 1/16" x 2 1/2" and feature very basic, plain backs:

I chose Johnny Mize to make a larger point.  He's actually not one of the players caught up in the "nationally-issued" rookie card debate, at least as far as Bowman is concerned, but The Big Cat affords us an excellent look at how silly the debate can be.

National Chicle, a brand name that implies a coast-to-coast distribution, is known for a issuing just a few sets during their short company lifespan, among them the 1934-36 Batter-Up and Diamond Stars. These were both multi-year releases, quite popular at the time and both still pursued by many pre-war collectors. As Mize's MLB debut occurred after the cards had been produced, with his rookie season was going swimmingly, National Chicle gave him a slot in the Diamond Stars semi-oversized, blank-backed paper premium set we know today as R312:

That's a whole lot of pastel!

Now, is that his rookie card, even though it's on paper?  Well, he was in some other sets between 1936 and 1941, where some were novelty issues  - paper based incidentally - before a 4-in-1 Exhibit from 1938 got him onto some actual cardboard. 

So is that 1938 Exhibit card considered his rookie card?  Well...there's the matter of his 1941 Double Play cards, or even the 1947 Tip Top release, which was essentially a bunch of regionally issued sets with a unified look, and saw a lot of players receiving their first taste of cardboard. Were they the sets with his rookie card?  Many hobbyists think not, as do many dealers.

Here's a quote from The Cardboard Connection site:

"Despite having numerous earlier cardboard appearances, many vintage experts consider Johnny Mize's true rookie card to be 1948 Bowman."

And another from Dean's cards:

"All of the 1948 Bowman cards are considered 'Rookie Cards.'"

Now I want to make it clear I'm not picking on either of these fine sites, nor their creators and copy writers. I'm quoting them because they are two major selling sites familiar to many collectors and both reiterate the conventional hobby wisdom concerning Mize's 1948 Bowman card. But some collectors say a card, even if issued nationally, had to be issued in a pack to qualify as a true rookie card.  Well, if that's the case, then the 1941 Double Play cards certainly fit the bill. But you can skin this particular big cat a few different ways still.

So what's the true Johnny Mize rookie card then? Is it the 1936 R312? The 1938 Exhibit? The 1941 Double Play? The 1947 Tip Top? One thing seems clear to me: it's certainly not the 1948 Bowman. I think there's a valid argument for the 1938 Exhibit as, to me at least, a premium like R312 is not quite the same thing as an issued card. Exhibits were widely distributed nationally as vending items, but so were cards from Topps and Bowman. Anyway, time to redirect this re-digression as this is a post about 1948 Bowman sets.

Once Baseball was done, Football was next, and it was a big step up at 108 cards, all featuring players from the NFL. The photos were still black-and-white (and the helmets still leather):

Think today's players are tough?  This guy was getting his head bashed in wearing a fluffed up skull cap while running around with shrapnel in his hip:

The backs get a little more interesting now and we see the debut of premium offers on the cards; there were only a handful but the football ring is certainly sport-appropriate.

There was also a wrapper redemption offer for an album, REA had one some time ago; I assume the offer was tucked inside the packs or was part of an ad campaign as it doesn't appear on the wrapper:

The rookie card debate is moot with this set, the only football card set of any repute was National Chicle's 1935 release, although there was an Exhibit football set as well  in 1948. It's also a non-factor with the 1948 Bowman Basketball set as essentially nothing existed covering the sport prior.

Still, while some subjects appear to have color photos, virtually all subjects had their uniforms enhanced and the added color really brightened these up. The premium offer remained, but specifically evolved on the ring, a nice touch:

The premium offer expiry date shows these were issued after Football debuted. The Basketball set had 72 subjects, with the players drawn for the Basketball Associated of America, an NBA precursor. But not all the cards had players, some offered diagrammed plays:

The backs were very basic on these cards and I'd imagine the idea was you would save them as a reference.

I can't find any record of an album for these, nor for the baseball cards either.  There was one final release for 1948, a 36 subject set of Movie Stars.  

It's pretty cool that Ms. Arden's premium offer was squarely aimed at girls; there were "lovely handkerchiefs" and a "personalized photo-brooch" available too, in case you wanted to fully accessorize your youthful ensemble:

That expiry date has this last in the 1948 Bowman release schedule. These have no album that I can find either but there was a snazzy (and quite rare) wrapper:

That wrapper image is from moviecard.com but I'm getting a virus warning for the site so proceed with caution if you head over there.

See ya in 1949! 

Deja Boo!

With Hallowe'en 2026 occurring a week from today, I'm (maybe) a little early here in taking a look at the second favorite "holiday" of kids just about everywhere. I've only peeked at old Bazooka promotions for the trick-or-treat crowd once previously (in 2016) so its been a long time coming.  Today we kick off in 1960, with look at the multi-faceted 80 Count Treats Box, which image is provided courtesy of BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd:

That Minnie Pearl wannabe and Sherlock Holmes pretender would stick around for a while; that little girl looks like she just saw something starling, doesn't she? Maybe it was a gh-gh-gh-ghost! But the real surprise was inside, where four 20 count party boxes of Bazooka, with their generic TCG colors pulling double duty, were snugged. Considering Election Day was just around the corner, the timing on the U.S. Presidents cut-out cards makes sense. I'm sure they were shipped and sold in other ways but this is kind of neat to see.

Another surprise lurked though, you had to turn over the box to see it, once again courtesy o'Shep, like every Bazooka image in this post!

The mask is a rare item and no wonder. I'm guessing the idea was the retailer could give it out or have his own kid use it. I'll bet a ton simply got tossed as well.

Here's those darn kids again; I'm not sure these images are an improvement but nonetheless: 

Now, just like Bazooka party boxes, not all Hallowe'en promotions were the same. Here, not only do we still get four boxes of the pink stuff, and in a 25 count configuration, we also get those other darn kids in the mix. That particular pair debuted in 1963 and persisted into the 1970's:

Those are Toppscience experiments on the box bottoms, which date this arrangement to 1967. As these were not the by-by-now-normal package design cards, it's hard to imagine many were saved by the kiddies. Plus you know, science was boring and reminded them of school, right?

This year Hallowe'en falls on the best day of the calendar if you're of trick-or-treating age: Saturday.  It happened to me twice back in the day, first when I was three and again when I was nine; that last one was epic!

Cocktail Time

Yonks ago, this blog was born as a way to examine all sorts of oddities and curiosities associated with Topps Chewing Gum, often by peeking at the wizards behind the curtain, or passing along information I had gathered during various research forays. Since then I have occasionally looked at Bowman cards, reasoning since Topps had bought the company in 1956 it was a combined history. 

I still think of it that way but Bowman has their own past and were the dominant player in the bubble gum field when Topps launched Bazooka in 1947. At some semi-distant point I plan to start dissecting their predecessor company, Gum, Inc. which was famously the issuer of many classic sets in the 1930's and very early 40's, and in many ways far more wilder and woolier than Bowman.  That is going to take gobs of research though. 

Bowman was well-organized compared to Topps, and their releases were generally quite orderly, whereas Gum, Inc.'s approach was very much the opposite. Both companies were the on-and-off playthings of J. Warren Bowman, known as Warren to everybody. He was an eccentric and brash big thinker and fearless entrepreneur, who sometimes saw his dreams realized, sometimes not. I profiled the man in issue #316 of The Wrapper if you want to search a copy out; he was quite an interesting cat.

After eleven years of incorporation and some fights with his Board that once got him briefly ousted from his own company, Warren Bowman renamed Gum, Inc. as Bowman Gum, Inc. He did this right in the middle of hostilities with the Axis Powers, on August 6, 1943 to be exact. But a year before that, he came up with this; thanks to BFF o' the Archive Jeff Shepherd for the scans:

I assume "flavorits" were chiclet like, maybe without the candy coating.  

The reverse indicia is hard on the eyes, isn't it?

But if you blow up the words, you get Gum, Inc. with a 1942 copyright; this chew being possibly their last product but, as seen above, bearing the Bowman name. So this certainly seems transitional:

The war had constricted all sorts of manufacturing and food supplies and Warren Bowman publicly vowed to stop selling bubble gum for the duration, but not, as it turned out, good old chewing gum. I suspect he couldn't get enough raw materials to produce bubble gum and just spun it into positive PR. He came up with other products to market and also sold various confections to the U.S. military as he bobbed and weaved, as did many firms during the war. I suspect the Bowman's Fruit Chewing Gum was discontinued quickly, as eight months before the corporate name change, he had copyrighted three chewing gum wrappers: Fruit (hold that thought), Cinnamon, and Spearmint. 

All three of these had their copyrights registered on December 17, 1942, as submitted by Gum, Inc., barely a year after Pearl Harbor. We see the Fruit flavor above, of course, but it's not clear to me if Gum, Inc. ever managed to scrape enough supplies together to manufacture the other two flavors. Why?  Well, in 1943 Warren Bowman pivoted once he had completed his reincorporation and, while he sold three chewing gum flavors, he only offered two chewing gums. Fruit Cocktail was one, marketed as Warren's but manufactured, as per the indicia, in 1943 by the newly-formed Bowman Gum, Inc. (and noting I have found scattered references to Warren-Bowman Gum, Inc. around this time and into at least 1947 as well):

"Fruit" being in quotes confirms the artificiality mentioned on the wrapper; there were no natural fruit flavors used. That could be why the quotation-mark-free Bowman's Fruit Chewing Gum didn't carry on. 

Fruit Cocktail was an "adult" chew, as was Cin-A-Mint, another 1943 concoction that was a portmanteau in both name and taste:

There wasn't much else marketed by Bowman before the end of the war, understandably so, given the state of the conflict and paucity of manufacturing supplies.

1945 brought an elegant and refined redesign, now a little more Art Deco inspired I'd say, to Fruit Cocktail, plus some actual fruit, as the flavor was no longer limited by the use of quotes; even the apostrophe in Warren's was gone in a total purge of packaging punctuation marks; this likely postdates V-J Day then:

As longtime readers here know, for decades chewing gum was primarily marketed as an after dinner breath freshener, or a quick sop after night out with the boys. Wrigley's was king, American Chicle the sprightly prince and almost everybody else in the game was an earl or viscount at best. Below that were the serfs like Topps and under that, if you solely made bubble-gum: the jesters. Bowman wanted a place at the royal chewing gum dais, but ending the war and having enough raw materials on hand to accomplish this were entirely different things for about eighteen months after Japan surrendered. So instead, Warrens bagged the cinnamon and came out with Mint Cocktail (and a lot of hyperbole) in 1947; we'll run into the "one and only" line again in a Philadelphia second:

Breathtaking, but really breath-making, right? Maybe it tasted like a Grasshopper, I dunno. Cin-A-Mint seemed squarely aimed at grown ups, but Bowman was sending out mixed messages by the end of the war with Mint Cocktail. A series of magazine ads used a number of actors to push the product:  Lana Turner and Van Heflin were the favored movie stars and the series also included Lady Iris Mountbatten, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and very much of so-called royal lineage. So the adult audience was covered but the ads also featured Margaret O'Brien, who was a child:

They had previously made a play for the tweens and teens with the Art Deco-ed version of Mint Cocktail, as this awesome 1945 ad that obviously features a caricature of Frank Sinatra shows. The Sultan of Swoon was at that time melting the, um, hearts of bobby-soxers across the country:

 

You can see how that the "one and only" wording predates 1947. Other means of advertising also mixed the grownups and the kids together. Take this matchbook, which would have been cigarette machine and bar-top fodder for sure:

Not so fast, bub; check out the interior:

Then there was a series of ads for Mint Cocktail that they placed in the comics sections of the Sunday papers, starting around the end of 1945; these were aimed at a wide audience:

In case you're wondering, the Kentucky Colonel varietal is the traditional name of the herb used in mint juleps and spearmint food flavorings. So the mint angle was covered by the colonel in both 1945 and then again 1947, now with the newer packaging highlighted:

Meanwhile, cinnamon seems to have just gone poof and as for Fruit Cocktail, I can't find a 1947 redesign into the classic stick format, and Bowman may have simply held it back as the flavorings were probably similar to that of their back-in-production bubble gum. We'll get into their pink bubbly stuff sometime soon, and I'm not full of Blony when I say that!

No Blony

A good four years ago I took a look at an extremely obscure Bowman baseball comic called Roger the Rookie Dodger. Other then two sightings in some old REA auctions, one of which was all the way back in March of 1992, and comments from one or two long time collectors, the set of ten comics has been consigned to the dustbin of history.  It doesn't appear in any guides, there's no articles about the set that I can find and all the known copies were sourced from the archive of George Moll, the advertising executive whose agency handled most of Bowman's artwork.

The scans in my earlier post were grainy, so details were understandably scarce. Well, a serendipitous message from BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd pointed me to one to a recent eBay action and I pounced immediately. Once I had it in in hand, the haze cleared and in addition to a gloriously large and colorful piece for my collection, some new information has emerged about young Roger and his learning curve.  Here then,  is this rather amazing comic:

First things first; this does not look like an issued piece, despite some folds. In fact, it does not appear the set was ever sold to the public based on the old REA descriptions and what I'm peeping here. In addition, I've yet to find anyone that's heard of the companion series featuring the Yankees. The timing seems pinned to Spring Training in 1948, which was the first year Bowman produced baseball cards, although they did so before the war as Gum, Inc. I wonder then, if this was intended to get a Bowman brand out to the baseball card and bubble gum buying public ahead of the inaugural set in cardboard livery. It was certainly an attention grabber; the colors are vivid and the whole wrapper measures 8 x 12.5 inches.  Once cut the comic would have been a whopping 8 x 9.25 inches; King Size Blony would have been a massive piece o' bubble gum!

You may notice there was a tie-in with Argosy, which was a magazine aimed at men that was primarily centered on outdoor activities and sports, kind of a cleaned-up "sweaty" pulp. I found a cheap copy of the March 1948 number online, which contains a long article about the whole contest:

I'll append the article at the end of this post, so as not to clog things up too much. There were some newspaper ads as well, published right around the start of spring training (the third week of February), which to me firmly puts the hoped for release date ahead of the first pitch of the regular season, which in 1948 occured on April 19th.

The ads were fairly mundane but help with the timeline; I'm not sure how widespread they were as these were the only two I could find: one from Iowa and another from in Tennessee, although I didn't put more than ten minutes into the task:

Whatever scotched the release of the ten Roger comics and the promised Yankees series is not something I've been able to determine from the Argosy article, which makes no mention of Bowman or Blony.

I'm not sure if they tucked a contest entry form in the March issue as the copy I bought had none, but it certainly appeared in the April issue.  I don't have this one but you can see it was included inside:

I promised you the March article and here it is. Check out the Sports Briefs on the last page, there's a pretty cool (and unrelated) surprise there!

This has me thinking a series covering the various Bowman products I haven't really looked at yet might be fun. We'll get to the cards in a Philadelphia minute, i.e. a few posts down the road, I'd first like to examine what Bowman came up with before that, which was plain ol' chewing gum.

Old 97

Well, it's finally happened; after 71 years the checklist for the 1955 Topps Small Hocus Focus set has finally been completed! I first started looking at this set and its larger - yet smaller - sibling, the 96 card Large set back when I was preparing my 2013 guide to the early days and ways of Topps.  It took a while but I finally realized the Small set had 30 more cards than the Large as they were produced in two different sizes, with the Small cards being, well, smaller than the larger ones. In fact, they were the same size as the 1948 Magic Photo cards, which were produced in two series of 126, which total was my educated guess as to the length of the Small Hocus Focus set. 

So, while the first 96 subjects are the same in both sizes, the last thirty cards, from 97 through 126, are found solely in the Small set. Factoring their distribution saw them nestled between the inner and outer wrappers of penny bubble gum tabs plus the general indifference then (and pretty much now) in the set beyond the Baseball Stars and Boxers, means it took about fifteen years for the "high number" checklist to work it self out as the identity of #97 remained a mystery. The inclusion of Robert E. Lee as #98 led to some theorization it could picture Ulysses S. Grant, not a bad assumption.

Well, it took some finagling but Friend o'the Archive Richard Lapointe managed to land this elusive final subject recently and while it's indeed a Civil War subject, it's not a general and it's definitely not a man.  Clara Barton turned out to be the final piece of the checklist puzzle:

She fills in the World Leaders subset too, which we knew but it's nice to see it in writing:

Now here it is, the complete "high number" checklist for the Small cards:

97 CLARA BARTON

98 ROBERT E LEE

99 ADMIRAL RICHARD E. BYRD

100 GENERAL GEORGE MARSHALL

101 GRAND CANYON

102 PARACUTIN

103 WALLY MOON

104 VOUGHT REGULUS

105 BOEING BOMARC

106 DOUGLAS NIKE

107 BASKETBALL

108 MARK TWAIN

109 ED MATHEWS

110 DOUGLAS K-3

111 LOU GEHRIG

112 CHRIST OF THE ANDES

113 AMELIA EARHART

114 286 1/2

115 ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

116 KID GAVILAN

117 BABE RUTH

118 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

119 S-200 "MINIJET"

120 ROCK OF GIBRALTAR

121 ARCHIE MOORE

122 KARL SPOONER

123 JEFFERSON DAVIS

124 CYCLING

125 NIAGARA FALLS

126 LOUIS PASTEUR

Winner's Choice

Just when you thought we were done with looking at the 1971 Topps Winners set (which is actually from 1972) some additional information has come to light from an unusual source, namely one of the actual winners of the contest!  Jake Ingebrigston, who has done the deepest of dives on the set, was able to establish contact with Brucette A. Rumenyak, who has retained, over half a century (!) later, some of the correspondence that went out to her from Topps.

If you don't fully recall, this was her Winners card:

I've shown that front before but not the back:

It is a sign of the time that her softball team was called the Hot Pants!

Now, I mentioned correspondence and here we go. Sy Berger let Brucette know she had been chosen as, well, a winner!

I still can't believe six kids took the baseball card sets over having their own cards, but they did. 

As those of us who collected back in this era, the Topps cards usually debuted around the end of spring training. Topps Sales Promotions Manager Carl Spinella wrote to Brucette and let her know things were happening as Sy's mention of March 1 had come and gone:

Sure enough, four weeks later, Sy Berger (well, his secretary I'd say) sent her a letter along with the goods. Note how Topps picked her two favorite players to mention within:

Mr. Ingebrigston passed along this interesting tidbit:

"A guy she didn't know approached her in college and said he had her Winners card. With my finding a Wilke in a large stash of early 70's cards along with this story, I think it's very safe to say these cards saw some distribution in some form of retail."

So, has anyone out there pulled a Winners card from a 1972 pack?

More from Jake:

"I believe 14 of the 19 cards made their way out the back door at Topps HQ. Perhaps through the Card Collectors Co.. The 5 not included are April Bole, Steve Wilke, Carl Scatena, Patricia Cox, and Philip Edgerly. I believe any example of these 5 (with the exception of the uncut sheet you reported on that was eventually cut and sold as a set) either originated in packs or from the subject themselves. These are exponentially more difficult than the other 14. It’s not even close."

He is looking into this, so we may have even more to come!  Meanwhile, Brucette also offers some insight as to how the contest entry forms were distributed and even the demographics Topps was dealing with:

"Those forms were on a cardboard pad not taped to a box or in the box. Me, my sisters and a lot of my friends took an entry form and filled it out. I grew up in Brownfield, PA which had a population of about 700 people maybe. Probably 25/30 of my friends entered the contest. So figure about 30 from a tiny little town."

If you're wondering, Brownfield is in the Southwest corner of Pennsylvania, deep in coal country. Well, stay tuned!

Topps Topics: Studies in Uncut Sheet Arrays - The Update

 

Tday we recap and update Mark Pekrul's six part series covering the Topps vintage uncut sheet arrays that examined the use of short prints and double prints by Topps in their vintage era. Part one can be found HERE, part two HERE, part three HERE, part four HERE, part five HERE, and part six HERE. This work was essentially been compiled independently of anything I’ve posted previously. Mark maintains a website that covers Topps Baseball sets from 1965 to 1994 in some commendable depth as well,  CLICK HERE to be transported.

As some of the analysis relied upon recreations of sheets from various partial snippets and miscuts of varying degree, a few years are really works in progress. As such, some updating is necessary. I've cross-post links and updates for the affected years in the prior posts accordingly.

FROM 1961-1964:

Entries on 1961 series 5 and 6 completely updated: 

Series 5 and 6 feature seven 11-card rows – a number not previously utilized and one which creates its own problems that can only be resolved by even more differences in print quantities per series.  In later years, Topps would develop a fairly standard way in which to format 77-card series, but initially things were a little crazy.

 We are fortunate to have images of both 1961 series 5 slits:

           

These establish the following row patterns:

Slit A: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, G

Slit B: E, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D

Cards in rows E and G are printed in ¾ the amount of cards in rows A, B, C and D.  These short-prints are:

E:

Hank Aaron (415)

Jack Chesbro Baseball Thrills (407)

Larry Sherry (412)

Braves Team Photo (463) [error – card number should be 426]

Dick Bertell (441)

Cliff Cook (399)

Eddie Yost (413)

Lou Gehrig Baseball Thrills (405)

Vern Law (400)

Bob Hendley (372)

Ralph Terry (389)

 

G:

Ken Boyer (375)

Dick Howser (416)

Ken Walters (394)

Walter Johnson Baseball Thrills (409)

Yogi Berra (425)

Bob Aspromonte (396)

Tom Borland (419)

Babe Ruth Baseball Thrills (401)

Mike Roarke (376)

Dick Ellsworth (427)

Frisco First Liners (383)

 

Only appearing two times, cards in row F are short-printed by ½ compared to cards from A, B, C and D:

F:

Ray Barker (428)

Charlie Neal (423)

Christy Mathewson Baseball Thrills (408)

Ty Cline (421)

Bill Mazeroski (430)

Juan Marichal (417)

5^th Series Checklist (361)

Bill Skowron (371)

Bob “Hawk” Taylor (446)

Don Larsen Baseball Thrills (402)

Jim Maloney (436)

 Reconstructions of each series 6 slit demonstrates the exact same row patterns as with series 5, and the exact same number and variety of short-prints. 

Those cards printed in ¾ the amount of the majority are:

E:

Jim Pagliaroni (519)

Ernie Banks MVP (485)

Harvey Kuenn (500)

Andy Carey (518)

Red Schoendienst (505)

Elston Howard (495)

Indians Team Card (467)

Hank Aaron MVP (484)

Jack Fisher (463)

Dick Farrell (522)

Johnny James (457)

 

G:

Phil Rizzuto MVP (471)

Joe Morgan (511)

Jim Bunning (490)

Ken MacKenzie (496)

Smoky Burgess (461)

Gil Hodges (460)

Willie Mays MVP (482)

Art Ditmar (510)

Jim Lemon (450)

Willie Tasby (458)

John DeMerit (501)

 

As in the 5^th series, the cards in row F appear at 50% the rate of the majority:

F:

Joe Cunningham (520)

Jackie Brandt (515)

Tom Cheney (494)

Series 7 Checklist (516)

Yogi Berra MVP (472)

Roy McMillan (465)

Ray Herbert (498)

Leroy Thomas (464)

Bob Will (512)

Walt Dropo (489)

Roy Campanella MVP (480)

  

Entries on 1962 series 5 and 6 updated:

Series 5-7 each contain 77 cards, but we don’t have enough information to know whether they continue the odd formatting from 1961 or not.   One slit from series 6 has been reconstructed, which displays the following row pattern:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, F, G

This is different from 1961 but doesn’t offer enough information to make any firm assessment of what the other slit looked like or what cards may have been over- or short-printed.   

 

Entry on 1963 series 5 update:

For series 5, we have been able to reconstruct one of the slits.  77-card series were still apparently flummoxing Topps because this slit shows a row pattern of:

A, B, C, A, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, A

That’s 4 times for row A, 2 each for rows B and C, and only one time each for D, E, F and G.  This sets up no end of short- and over-printing possibilities, but until the appearance of the other slit can be determined, we don’t yet have enough to go on. 

 

  

1964 series 5 introduction update:

For the 77-card series 5, we have a composite image (made up of two partials) of one of the slits.  It presents a much more orderly arrangement than previous 77-card slit layouts:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E

An examination of card counts at eBay has allowed us to be all but certain that 33 cards (three rows) were over-printed by 33%:

1964 series 6 introduction update:

Both series 6 slits have been reconstructed.  The identified row patterns are:

A: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E

B: D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A

This creates a scenario in which three rows are over-printed (four times each) compared to the other four (three times each).  Though specific row arrangements occasionally vary, this pattern of 4x/3x with three rows over-printed continues in subsequent Topps 77-card series, and all but certainly applies to series 5 of this 1964 set. 

1967 Series 6 introduction update:

Recently, an image of a full series 6 sheet appeared on eBay.  This confirms the following row pattern:

Slit A: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E

Slit B: C, D, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A

Cards in rows A, C and D were over-printed:

 

From the 1969 series 4 introduction update:

For the first time since 1961 (perhaps 1962 and/or 1963 as well), a Topps series contains short-printed cards.  Rows D, E and I appear only twice each across a full sheet, while the other rows make 3 appearances each.  D, E and I are therefore short-prints.

-------------

There could be more updates down the road.  Stay tuned!