It's All In The Presentation

After digesting Bowman in early 1956, Topps would ride the cresting age curve of baby boomers by cutting back on ancillary sets such as 1955's Double Header and 56's Baseball Buttons--the latter truncated as a result of said purchase--and concentrating on cranking out their regular baseball and football issues.  Simple card designs were the norm in the years following as the marketplace, devoid of any major competitors for a handful of years, was reset by Topps.

1959 though brought resistance from Fleer, who were able to snag an exclusive contract with Ted Williams and also brought out a big seller with a Three Stooges set. Topps, as usual, responded once it became clear measures had to be taken.  They added some (gorgeous) baseball and football cards to the back of their Bazooka party boxes and rapidly cranked up their PR and marketing apparatus.  The end result of the latter was the "Elect Your Favorite Rookie" campaign and the inaugural Rookie Banquet, held after the end of the baseball season.

Topps would really start bulking up their response to Fleer in 1960 and continue with a growing onslaught of extra sets and bonus inserts through 1963 before they prevailed against their Philly based baseball card issuing competitor in court and downshifted a bit in '65. During this period, yet another campaign was also waged, with Fleer offering ballplayers extra funds if they provided a copy of their Topps contract. Fleer was signing up players at a furious clip, although not under as many exclusives as Topps, at least at the major league level. Topps began firing back with their own campaign, this one primarily at more of an executive level.

The annual Rookie Banquets were one likely part of this campaign; I've written extensively about them and it's worth clicking over via the labels at right if you want to bone up. The other thing I think they did was start sending out Presentation Sets of their baseball cards every year. These went to various team executives, key ball players and other such luminaries.

Sy Berger is on record saying he gave presentation sets to Willie Mays and it would be very interesting to see what players actually got these from Topps.  Was it just superstars?  Of interest in particular in this regard, is Joe Adcock receiving a set in 1963, which was much later consigned to auction. Adcock, no longer a major name in the sport, was famously part of the 1963 Fleer set and is semi-short printed therein (replaced by a checklist, or vice-versa).  He is also in the second series of Topps that year. Coincidence?

Not very well known today, these sets were issued in five boxes annually, each with roughly 114-120 apiece inside and designated a "Limited Edition" by Topps.  Here's the breakdown by year of set lengths and how they divide out:

1959: 572 cards with 114.4 per box average
1960: 572 cards with 114.4 per box average
1961: 587 cards with 117.4 per box average
1962: 598 cards with 119.6 per box average
1963: 576 cards with 117.4 per box average

The boxed sets were all issued at once, like so:

(Mile High Auctions)

It's a little hard to see but each box states "XXXXX Collectors Set 1959" with "XXXXX" being First, Second, Third, Fourth or Fifth as filled.  Here's a better shot, with one example from each year through 1962:

(Robert Edward Auctions)

To state the obvious:

1959 Red

1960 Black

1961 Green

1962 Blue

1963 Brown

Here is the '63, with a couple of side views thrown in:

(Robert Edward Auctions)

These have never been plentiful and a few sets (very few) were auctioned here and there in the 90's but most all have been broken up and only the empty boxes pop up now, and infrequently at that.  The reason these have all been pillaged is that the cards within are super high quality in general, although some pinching of the inner and outer-most cards has been noted by (lucky) prior owners.

Friend o'the Archive Don Johnson, who has seen several cards liberated from the 1962 boxes and owns a '63 presentation set, describes the presentation cards as "stunning, jawdropping......you name the adjective." He goes on to say they are "a little smaller" (more on this in a second) but also "outrageously glossy and colorful".

The smaller dimensions seem to be the result of a different cutting method being used when compared to how the "regular" cards were sliced. Anthony Nex, yet another Friend o'the Archive, describes the cuts as a "bevel" and I have seen a couple of references to this phenomenon over the years.  The end result is some of these get rejected by PSA when submitted for grading as not meeting minimum size requirements.

I have also heard the gloss referred to as being similar to the gloss found on the 1980's Topps insert "All Star" and "Rookie" sets, which would make it very noticeable indeed .

A couple of auctions have featured mailing cartons that give a glimpse as to who might have received these treasures.  Here is a 1963 set with its Topps labeled mailer, slightly blurred address-wise by Heritage Auctions:

Here is a better view of the label:

Hamey, as almost none of us will recall, served as the Yankees General Manager from 1961-63, succeeding George Weiss.

Here's another 1963 set addressed to Clarence Campbell, the President of the National Hockey League from 1946-77:

(All Sports Auctions)

O-Pee-Chee was issuing Hockey cards in Canada at this time, using Topps supplied materials, so maybe this wasn't as big a stretch as it seems. Friends in high places.....have influence in many corners. And to answer an obvious question, I am unaware of presentation sets for any other sports.

Keith Olbermann advises he recalls the son of Irv Kaze bringing Presentation Sets from 1961-63 to work one day in the 80's.  The elder Kaze was the Angels Director of PR in those years and those sets ended up with his son. A lot of these sets probably went directly to the kiddies in the house when dad got home from work.

Some slabs from PSA and SGC identify the entombed card as being from a presentation set. Here's a 1961 Bob Friend.  You can see that despite the many superlatives one could assign to these, at least one derogatory adjective, namely "snowy", can also apply!

There's clearly a lot more to learn about these sets and the ways they were manufactured and distributed. If you know anything, drop me a line.

How Irregular

Well it's been just over a year since my last post on The Card Collector and now that I've dusted off some more issues, I thought I'd share some additional fun facts.

I don't have a full run of issues but I did note that sometime between issue 11 (5/15/61) and 16 (12/30/61) Woody Gelman turned over the editorship to Jim Zak of Cicero, Illinois, although it remained essentially a house organ for Gelman's Card Collectors Company, which still published the little 'zine.

First up, from number 19 (3/30/62) we get an issue date for the Bazooka Presidents set, namely 1962.
(UPDATE 6/23/20: It turns out it's from 1960 after all):

Previously attributed for the most part to 1960, this 33 card sets runs through Eisenhower.  These were issued in the familiar 3 panel package designs.  Here's old Zachary Taylor:

Later in the same issue we see that the 1962 Topps Baseball Stamps were being issued 40 at a time, at least in the beginning.

The Stamps did clock in at 200 subjects, although Roy Sievers is shown with two teams (Athletics and Phillies) as Topps corrected a mistake as he was never on the A's. This little hiccup meant 201 stamps were actually issued!

Anyhoo......Fleer's FTC complaint against Topps makes news.  Fleer would win one of their arguments in 1965 before the decision was overturned and they sold all their player contracts to Topps in '66. Topps had 414 of 421 major leaguers locked up and Fleer took exception.

Things pick up a bit in the next issue, dated 4/20/62, check out the CCC ad:

1949 Bowman PCL cards are one thing but 1956 (really 1955) small Hocus Focus cards in uncut sheet form for $2.00???!!!  The $1.00 price point for the PCL cards is intriguing as the recently reappeared 1952 Baseball high numbers (garbage scow, my ass) were going for the same rate.  As it has turned out, the former are a good bit harder to find that the latter.  And I've never seen an uncut sheet of the Hocus Focus cards-the mind reels at what that would be worth today.  Other ho-hum items include T205's, Hopalong Cassidy foils and the rare #68 Fleer Ted Williams card. Jim Zak had some deals too, no?

In issue 22 (6/20/62)  we get one of the first inklings of the 1962 Baseball green tints:

Meanwhile issue #24 (8/20/.62) brings 1949 Bowman misprint sheets and 1952 Topps highs. Woody was really turning up some goodies!

I hope to fill in the missing issues (I have about half of the run) but these seem a little harder to find than some other hobby mags of the day. Some are also very mundane but the hobby was visibly nascent for two decades and the Card Collector was a vital early publication that helped fuel the wide-ranging world of cards that exists today.

62 Glue

1962 saw a much improved Topps Baseball Stamp insert.  Better colors and a better looking album snazzed up an insert set that was far more hip than the regular issue cards in year no. 2 of major league expansion.

Bright yellow (NL) or red (AL) backgrounds for the players made the stamps almost glow in 1962. Some panels had both colors at once even (players in different combination could appear on 2 or 3 different panels):

The album reiterated those colors:

I can't find a scan of a retail box of the albums unfortunately.  If one turns up I'll amend this post.

The album interior team pages have a capsule summary of what might come and some stats.  I actually like the team pages better in '61 but these aren't bad:

Team logos were added, as you can see and the stamp images in each slot make these a different kind of collectible for team or player enthusiasts:

Those stats came right from the backs of the cards, like so:

Stamps were cut down into vertical panels from a larger sheet. A couple of colors were added to the palette by Topps, to great effect, on the logos:

 Yellow process proof anyone?

As with the 61's, I need to do a deep dive into the printing of the stamps.  There are multitudes of extra and short printed panels in '62 but that's for another time.

The wax wrapper hawked the stamps of course:

While. thanks to a site called the Lifetime Topps Project, we can see how the wax pack retail box scans hawked the albums:

There were more teams but less subjects in 1962: 200 vs 208 the year prior.  No matter, the '62 stamps were a great little insert in a decade filled with such things.

Metal Shop

Running off a sheet of cards at the printers would seem like a pretty mundane task these days. That's not the case of course but like anything else it seems like it happens almost effortlessly these days. It isn't and never really has been all that easy and there are a lot of processes involved before the final product spins out of the press.

One part of one method, namely offset lithography printing,  involves the use of thin aluminum plates, which have the images being used to make the cards (or anything else really) etched on to them.  If I have this right (and this is a very simplified explanation), the plates are dampened with a water based solution then inked in the press. The ink ends up adhering only to the "dry" areas to be printed, as the solution prevents ink from adhering where it is applied.  The inked portion is transferred, or offset, to a rubber roller, making a reversed image before being rolled over the press sheet.  This is done for each color pass.

The plates cannot be "wiped" once used, they have to be melted down and remanufactured.  As you can imagine, a lot of aluminum has to be destroyed for any type of meaningful recycling to occur, ergo when it comes to Topps, there are few aluminum plates floating around.  That is, unless you are talking about 1962.

 Take this 1962 Kansas City team cards (#384):

In order to print it, you needed this first:

Compare that to this 1962 Football plate, which has corroded to a degree:

When you look at the card this plate produced you can see that the Baseball plate has an additional element, namely the team name is visible in the black oval. Therefore, it must have been used to produce a different color than the one for Chandler. The inset photo is missing as well; that would have been added during a different color run.

A large find of 1962 aluminum sheets was noted in an SCD ad in  the January 31, 1986 issue where Mid-Atlantic Coin Exchange was selling 1962 Baseball Green Tint plates (second series). They also had a number of 1962 Hockey plates as well.  All of these had been cut from the original, larger aluminum sheets used to make the cards. However, at least two partial sheets have survived from the Hockey run:

You can get a good idea of how vivid these were in the unfaded areas (which look like they had something like a paint can on top of them for years. 

Plates even exist for promotional material, like this one for the 1962 Baseball Bucks set:

I'm not certain how these all came to survive.  It's not like today where Topps sells or uses as inserts the plates that produce the cards. Given that the green tint plates were in the '62 mix, it seems plausible Topps required the plates be returned to them as that run was not produced in Philadelphia. Or did Topps also sub out work on the Football and Hockey sets that year? No matter where they were printed, it's clear these sheets never got melted down.