I had many uncut sheets
My grandfather William Zabel was the President of Zabel Brothers Co in Philadelphia. When I was 7 years old in 1950, he began to give me full uncut sheets of the Bowman baseball cards. I taped them to my bedroom walls in Ocean City, NJ. I had full sets of sheets of Bowman and Topps through about 1959. In addition, my grandfather would bring me error sheets (upside down reverse side), one color missing, etc. I kept all the sheets in a large cardboard box (like a large TV would come in today).
In the summer of my Freshman year at college, 1962, I worked at Zabel Bros. One job I had was to go through all the old zinc/copper printing plates in the huge basement storeroom and ready them to be sold as scrap metal. I found many of the plates used to print the 1949-1956 Bowman and Topps cards. I packaged them with other plates. They were probably melted down.
When I returned to the US from 2 years in Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1970, I discovered that my mother had thrown into the trash my entire collection of uncut sheets as well as my huge individual card collection.
I wasn't angry, just sad. And I now wonder what would have happened if I had kept the original plates and could reprint the cards. Certainly the market value of the existing ones would be a lot lower.
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