Spirit of '66

Not too long ago I took a look at the early months of 1969, when Topps transitioned their manufacturing indicia from showing Brooklyn to Duryea.  The move to Duryea was completed in early 1966 and Topps designed a new logo in celebration.  Production code dating would soon follow, likely as a way to help coordinate efforts between the creative staff in Brooklyn and the packaging plant in Duryea, with a side trip to Philadelphia for printing.

The new logo, all in lowercase and with a distinctive curved "t", is well known and one I think is a minimalist classic:




Trademark records indicate Topps used this logo for the first time in late 1965, although I have yet to find any 1965 wrappers or merchandising showing it and it was probably phased in slowly, first appearing on letterhead and marketing information for the 1966 sets.  Topps then began using the logo on their packaging in early 1966.  You can see the '65 baseball wrapper uses a slightly stylized verison of the old Topps lettering that dated back to 1938 and the founding of the company:

The logo then transitioned to a very generic looking one by the time the football cards hit the shelves in late summer:

Some wrappers, usually featuring images licensed from TV shows, didn't even mention Topps:

That Exploding Battleship was being pushed all year by Topps, by the way.  For some reason, the massively successful Ugly Stickers had a wrapper that was devoid of any Topps logo as well:

By 1966 the new logo was featured prominently on the baseball packs, which also introduced an early version of the baseball design that would be replicated many, many times in future years.  

Some old branding would remain though, such as on this header card on the 1966 Rak Paks:

That's from www.baseballwrappers.com by the way-go give 'em some love!  I suspect Topps were using up old header cards and of course the branding/logo wasn't even consistently deployed as this 1966 wrapper shows:

It's Topps, so there will always be inconsistencies but by the time the '66 football season had rolled around they were on top of it:

It's around this time that the production codes started to be developed and used.  As I've said previously, those codes require some serious contemplation before they can be dissected but it will happen eventually.

Proof Positive

Last fall I did a short post on some 1967 Paper Baseball proofs that had come from the Woody Gelman collection. These were printed on high quality white paper and featured four low numbered 67's. There has since been an informative thread on Net54baseball.com that shows a few more of these style proofs and since I'm always happy to use the scans of others, it makes perfect fodder for Opening Day (sorry, I do not like opening night-as far as I am concerned the season opener should always be in Cincinnati).

The earliest proof shown across the way is from 1957. Other than a 1956 Topps Pin Proof of Gus Zernial, it is the earliest proof I am aware of from Topps, so it's a neat little item:



If you can link to the Net54 site above, you will see these came from a Richard Gelman ad in a 1979 issue of the Trader Speaks. This would have been just after his Dad Woody passed away so clearly a treasure trove existed. You will see as we go on that the Groth card also has a printed reverse, unseen among the paper proofs I have seen so far.



The Groth is from the collection of Mark Rios, who kindly granted permission for me to post the images here. All of the offered paper proofs in the TTS ad were from the 1957 high numbers. Of course, you could have purchased 1970 Cloth Sticker proofs from the same ad!

Next we get to annoy some Mantle completists with a '66 Mick (#50), from the collection of Steve B (thanks Steve!):



We may have some more cool proofs from Steve a little bit down the road. That Mantle is #50 and blank backed here.

Super Topps collector Al Richter has a '67 paper proof sheet that is a sibling of mine:



Once again, these, like mine, are from the first series sheet and blank backed.

I find the '67 set endlessly fascinating. The cards look great, the photography is outstanding and the graphics just kill me. Plus, there's the crazy high numbers that year. Without a doubt, 1967 is one of the top five classic Topps baseball sets in my mind.

Proofs are one of the final Topps frontiers-many are in ungraded form and salted away in older collections. There must be a ton more of them out there; if they show up we'll post 'em here in some update threads.