CARDBOARDFILE
baseball / Topps
407 cards
Sy Berger and Woody Gelman designed this set at a kitchen table in 1951, and it is the point where the modern baseball card starts. Bigger than anything Bowman was making at 2 5/8 by 3 3/4 inches, in colour, with a team logo, a facsimile signature, and - for the first time - the previous season's statistics and a career line on the back.
Four hundred and seven cards, issued across six series through 1952.
The first series, cards 1 to 80, came with either a red back or a black back. Both exist for every card in that run, and collectors who want them all need 487 cards rather than 407.
The sixth series is the one everybody knows about. Cards 311 to 407 went on sale in September, by which time children had gone back to school and turned to football, and retailers who had been burned earlier in the year simply did not order them. Topps was left with the stock.
To fill a hundred-card printing sheet with ninety-seven cards, Topps double-printed the first three of the series: Mickey Mantle at 311, Jackie Robinson at 312 and Bobby Thomson at 313 - the biggest names from the three New York clubs. The other ninety-four were single-printed, and it shows in the population report. PSA has graded an average of 514 copies of each single print against 1,705 of the Mantle.
Then there is the barge.
The story every collector knows is that around 1960, needing the warehouse space, Sy Berger loaded three hundred to five hundred unsold cases of high numbers onto a garbage barge, had it towed a few miles off the New Jersey shore, and dumped them into the Atlantic. Berger told it himself, in a Topps anniversary magazine in 2001, and said he was aboard.
It may not be what happened. In the mid-1980s, after it emerged that Topps had licensed its plates for parallel sets printed in Venezuela between 1959 and 1968, American dealers travelled to Caracas to buy them. They advertised in the local papers, and among the people who turned up to sell were people holding 1952 Topps high numbers. The most likely explanation is that the surplus was shipped to Venezuela rather than sunk.
This site does not know which account is true. What can be said is that the ocean story rests on one man's recollection given nearly fifty years after the fact, and that a competing explanation exists with physical cards behind it.
Either way the high numbers are scarce, and the reason is the same - they did not sell in 1952.
What the population report shows about the low numbers is less famous and just as stark. Card 1 is Andy Pafko, and sixty-one per cent of its graded copies come back PSA 3 or lower. Across every other card in the set that figure is eighteen per cent. Pafko sat at the front of the stack and took the rubber band, which is the same thing that happened to Luke Skywalker in 1977, to Superman in 1940 and to the Star Michael Jordan in 1985.
PSA has graded 277,508 cards from this set. It is the most graded post-war set there is.
Decide which set you are building before you spend anything, because 1952 Topps means three different projects.
The 407-card set is the standard one. The 487-card set adds every red back and black back from the first series. And a master set adds the error cards at 48 and 49, the Ray Boone colour variations at 55, and the handful of wrong backs PSA catalogues under the number printed on the back rather than the player's own.
High numbers cost more and always will. Cards 311 to 407 were the series that did not sell, and ninety-four of the ninety-seven were single-printed. The three double prints - Mantle, Robinson and Thomson - are the most available cards in the series and still the most expensive, because of who is on them.
Low grade is the market here. Across the whole set eighteen per cent of graded copies are PSA 3 or lower, and on card 1 it is sixty-one. A PSA 4 or 5 of a 1952 Topps card is an ordinary good example, not a compromise.
Card 1 deserves its own warning. Andy Pafko is a common player and an expensive card, entirely because of where it sat in the stack. If you want a clean one you are competing with everyone building the set.
Buy graded above the low grades and verify the certificate. This set has been reprinted, restored and trimmed more than most, and the money at the top justifies the caution.
And check the size before buying pages. At 2 5/8 by 3 3/4 inches these do not fit a standard modern sleeve.