Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

I noticed this week that eBay seller bmw_cards2 has a bunch of 1948 Bowman wrong-back cards for sale. Pictured here is one of them, a Joe Muha card with a Harry Gilmer back.

I was curious about how the cards got the wrong backs, so I looked at where they were positioned on the uncut sheets. (See my 1948 Bowman virtual uncut sheet page.) It turns out that the fronts of all of BMW’s cards are from the first sheet, and the backs are all from the corresponding positions on the third sheet. (The Muha card is fourth from the right in the bottom row.) I don’t know much about printing, but it looks to me like the printer printed the front of the sheet, then used the wrong plate when printing the back.

Searching eBay further, I found a 1948 Bowman Art Faircloth card with a similar problem, only the Faircloth card has both the correct back and an incorrect back printed on it. Again, the front of the card is from the first sheet, and the incorrect back is from the corresponding position on the third sheet.

I have never seen uncut sheets of 1951 Bowman football cards, but I am guessing that they were configured like 1950 and 1952 Bowman sheets. Yesterday I put together 1951 Bowman virtual uncut sheets and added them to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Click on the image to have a look!

This week I added virtual uncut sheets of 1948 Leaf and 1949 Leaf football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. From a picture of a 1949 sheet, I think I have also figured out what the 1948 sheets looked like. The 1949 Leaf set is basically a subset of the 1948 Leaf set with the card backs and card numbers changed, and it appears to me that the sheets would have been similar. Take a peek, and let me know what you think.

Last week I added virtual uncut sheets of 1952 Bowman Large football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. From what I have read, Bowman simply enlarged their 1952 Small sheets to get the 1952 Large sheets, and when they printed the Large sheets, some cards on the edges of the sheets were truncated. The cards on the edges of the sheets thus became the short prints in the set.

Click the image below to see all of the 1952 Bowman Large sheets. Also, for an overview of the topic, see an earlier blog article, U is for Uncut Sheets.

Yesterday I added virtual uncut sheets of 1950 Bowman football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 144 cards in the 1950 Bowman set, and they were printed on 4 sheets of 36. Compared to the other virtual sheets I have done, these were relatively easy, because the cards were arranged on the sheets in numerical order. The price guides don’t say that any of the 1950 Bowman cards were short prints, but it appears to me that the fourth sheet was printed in somewhat smaller numbers than the others.

Also see U is for Uncut Sheets for an overview of the topic.

The 1966 Philadelphia football card set contains 198 cards, and it was almost certainly printed on a single, standard 264-card sheet. This means that 66 cards were repeated on the sheet, and so there are 66 double prints in the set. The price guides have not identified the double prints, however.

By comparing an uncut half-sheet with PSA’s population report, I believe I was able to identify the double prints in the set. I added an explanation to my 1966 Philadelphia virtual uncut sheet page and marked the cards I think are double prints in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

I haven’t seen the second half-sheet, so I could be wrong. Those who collect the set know, though, that some cards are much easier to find than others, and the cards I have chosen as double prints match up pretty well with cards that are easy to find.

The Gale Sayers rookie card, shown here, is one of the double prints. PSA has graded nearly twice as many examples of this card than of Dick Butkus’s rookie card, which is also in this set.

Yesterday I added a virtual uncut sheet of 1962 Topps football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Looking at the sheet–and having looked at numerous other uncut sheets–I convinced myself that the price guides have misidentified many of the short prints in this set. I would be interested in your feedback.

(Click the image to see the uncut sheet page.)

Today I added virtual uncut sheets of 1948 Bowman football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The numbering of the cards on the sheets shows why some of them are short prints, and the positions of the cards on the sheets shows why some are scarce in high grade.

(Click the image to see the uncut sheet page.)

• Search nearmintcards.com for 1948 Bowman football cards
• Search eBay for 1948 Bowman football cards

Today I put together another virtual uncut sheet, this time for 1958 Topps football cards. Once again, the cards that are scarcest in high grade are on the edges of the sheet.

(Click on the image to see the whole sheet.)

Over the weekend I added most of the 1950 Topps Felt Back cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. As I wrote in T is for Topps, Part 1, these are homely cards, and they are even homelier in lower grades. Because they are colored to the edges, any wear on the edges stands out, and even cards in good shape can have loose threads hanging off the felt.

The cards do have their positive qualities, though: that they actually have felt on the back is kind of cool, and the terms describing the players (e.g., “Brainy Quarterback”) are unique and fun. The set includes the rookie cards of two Pro Football Hall of Famers, Ernie Stautner and Lou Creekmur; and two famous college coaches, Joe Paterno and Darrell Royal.

The cards were printed twenty-five to a sheet, with all red cards on one sheet, all blue cards on another sheet, etc. You can see a complete red sheet and a complete brown sheet, as well as their backs, on the Memory Lane Inc. web site.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for 1950 Topps Felt Backs.
• Search eBay for 1950 Topps Felt Backs.

Over the weekend I added 1974 Parker Brothers cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These fifty cards were pieces in a game called Parker Brothers Pro Draft. They were printed by Topps for Parker Brothers, and they closely resemble 1974 Topps regular issue cards. A message board thread at tradingcardcentral.com has some nice photos of the game. (Note that the box cover pictures 1973 Topps cards, not 1974.)

The object of the Pro Draft game was to assemble a complete starting offensive lineup, so the set of Parker Brothers includes only offensive players: five quarterbacks, five tight ends, five centers, ten running backs, eight guards, eight tackles, and nine wide receivers. (Topps labeled Dan Dierdorf a guard, though he played tackle from 1972 to 1981.) The cards are not ordered sequentially; they have the same numbers as the corresponding cards in the regular 1974 Topps set. The only differences between the Parker Brothers cards and the Topps cards are:

• Six of the Parker Brothers cards have different images on the front than their counterparts in the Topps set.
• Cards from early editions of the Pro Draft game have 1972 stats on the back instead of 1973 stats.
• Cards from early editions of the game also have two asterisks in the copyright line on the back, whereas their counterparts in the regular Topps set have just one asterisk. (Complicating matters, some of the regular 1974 Topps cards also have two asterisks in the copyright line, but those cards don’t have counterparts in the Parker Brothers set. According to Beckett.com, the regular Topps cards with two asterisks are 26, 129, 130, 156, 162, 219, 265-364, 367-422, and 424-528.)
• Cards from late editions of the Pro Draft game have 1973 stats and one asterisk on the back. Except for the six that have different pictures on the front, the late edition Parker Brothers cards are indistinguishable from the regular 1974 Topps cards.

Here are the six cards whose fronts differ between the Parker Brothers set and the regular 1974 Topps set. Click on any picture to see a slightly bigger image.

Number	1974 Parker Brothers	1974 Topps
23
49
116
124
126
127

Here are examples of the backs. The back on the left appeared on Parker Brothers cards in early editions of the game. The back on the right appeared on regular 1974 Topps cards and on Parker Brothers cards in late editions of the game.

This is a picture of an uncut sheet of 1974 Topps cards that my friend cardbender posted on photobucket. The cards in the block marked in orange correspond to the fifty cards in the Parker Brothers set. You can see that three cards in the block are All Pro cards, and three are action cards, oriented horizontally. These are the six cards that Topps changed for the Parker Brothers set.

Though the Parker Brothers cards are less common than the regular 1974 Topps cards, they don’t appear to sell for a premium. I’m sure that collectors often don’t recognize them; in fact, before writing this article, I went through my own 1974 Topps set and found that three of the cards were actually Parker Brothers cards. You can find some Parker Brothers cards correctly identified on eBay, and you can also find some hiding among the 1974 Topps cards. For most of the cards–all but the six pictured above–you need to see the backs to identify them. Wheatstatecards is one seller who has some unidentified Parker Brothers cards. He includes scans of the card backs in all of his listings, so you can peruse his 1974 Topps listings and look for Parker Brothers cards.

This uncut sheet of 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns cards was on eBay last week. 1946 was the Browns’ first year; they were part of the new eight-team All-American Football Conference. The Browns were the AAFC champions all four years of the league’s existence, 1946-1949, and they joined the NFL when the AAFC folded in 1950. As far as I know, these Sears cards were the only cards printed of an AAFC team.

Conspicuously absent from this set are Marion Motley and Bill Willis, African American stars who later made the Pro Football Hall of Fame. According to Willis’s Wikipedia page, the two did not play in the Browns’ 1946 game against the Miami Seahawks, because they were forbidden by law to play against white players in Miami.

This small Sears set contains pre-rookie cards of three other Hall of Fame players: Otto Graham, Dante Lavelli, and Frank Gatski. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) The black-and-white head shots are nice, but otherwise the cards are unremarkable: all eight have the same ad on the front and the team’s 1946 schedule on the back.

The set is rare–these particular cards are the first I have seen–so it is hard to assign a value to the cards. The highest bid in this auction was $2000, and it did not meet the seller’s reserve. Perhaps the seller will list it again with a better description and a scan that shows the corners of the sheet.

For more interesting auctions, see my Interesting eBay Auctions page.

Occasionally you will see uncut sheets of vintage cards up for sale. Studying uncut sheets can give you insight into why some cards are much harder to find than others. For example, by looking at the uncut sheets for a set, you can see why some cards are considered short prints or double prints. For most sets, the price guides indicate which cards are short prints or double prints, and they adjust the cards’ prices accordingly. I say most, because I believe some short prints are not documented–those in the old Philadelphia sets, for instance.

(Image from legendaryauctions.com; click on it to see whole sheet.)

Short prints and double prints are just part of the story. A card’s position on an uncut sheet can also affect its scarcity, because cards on the corners and edges of the sheets were more likely to be damaged in production. I have not seen this factored into price guides’ prices, though: if two common cards were printed in equal numbers, the price guides will usually–if not always–assign them the same price.

The price guides do assign higher prices to the first and last cards in a set, asserting that the first and last cards generally got more wear than the other cards. Supposedly, lots of kids sorted their cards into numerical order, put rubber bands around them, and banged them around. In practice, though, I find that first and last cards aren’t noticeably scarcer in high grades than the other cards, unless they happened to be on the corners and edges of the sheets.

A recent–and timely!–thread in the Collectors Universe forums includes pictures of numerous uncut baseball card sheets and a nice discussion about short prints and double prints. The thread shows the patterns that the card companies used when arranging cards from sets of different sizes on the sheets. Depending on the size of the set (or series within a set), the card companies repeated rows of cards on the sheets in different patterns. I recommend reading the thread.

Pictured here is the card I always use as an example of one that is scarce because of its position on the sheet. It’s a 1960 Fleer Jim Woodard card, and it was in the bottom-left corner of the sheet. The Woodard is easily the toughest card in the set–PSA has graded only four of them 7 or better–and a PSA 8 would sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Most other PSA 8 1960 Fleer commons sell for $10-20.

Over the past year, I have put together a number of “virtual” uncut sheets in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, including one for the 1960 Fleer set. I have included a little discussion for each sheet, as well. Rather than repeat the information here, I’ll just point you to the pages for the sheets:

• 1948 Bowman
• 1948 Leaf
• 1949 Leaf
• 1950 Bowman
• 1951 Bowman
• 1952 Bowman Large
• 1953 Bowman
• 1954 Bowman
• 1955 Bowman
• 1956 Topps
• 1957 Topps
• 1958 Topps
• 1959 Topps
• 1960 Fleer
• 1960 Topps
• 1961 Fleer
• 1962 Topps
• 1963 Fleer
• 1963 Topps
• 1964 Philadelphia
• 1965 Philadelphia
• 1966 Philadelphia
• 1967 Philadelphia
• 1968 Topps
• 1969 Topps
• 1970 Topps Super

Here are more of the ABCs:

• Previous: T is for Topps, Part 4: the 1970s
• Next: V is for Values
• All of the ABCs

Yesterday I put together more virtual uncut sheets, this time for 1968 Topps football cards. Again you can see that cards on the corners and edges of the sheets are the toughest to find in high grade.

(Click on the image to see the sheets.)

Today I assembled another virtual uncut sheet, this time for 1966 Philadelphia football cards. Those who collect the set know that some cards are much tougher than others. It appears that the cards in some rows were short printed.

(Click on the image to see the sheet.)