1969 Topps White Letter variations
 

As someone who is approaching a decision point on whether to seriously look at trying to acquire these, I'd like to get a sense of the consensus here - are the white letter variations printing or design flaws? In other words, did someone at Topps say "hey - who sent these to the printer with white letters? Tell them to stop the presses until we get them some corrected sheets", or "hey, looks like something was off with the yellow ink that day"?

Thanks!

You can ask Rich. He did an article on them :)

They are common enough that they are variations. A missing ink print freak will rarely amount to more than a few sheets of cards, so only a handful of examples. 1948 Leaf 'white' background cards are probably the most common print freaks and they are still rare.

Yeah, they are definitely the result of a printing/layout/separation/etc. flaw. The yellow is present on the rest of the card (greens, skin tones and such), so the yellow was never added to the names until later, when the mistakes were 'discovered.'

I would agree with Adam that these are variations. These were very common where I grew up in the midwest. I had never seen a yellow letter Mantle, they were all white letter cards in our area.

I appreciate all the replies - there does seem to be consensus, but I'm not clear on what it is - and perhaps it's my ignorance of the printing process. I'm probably not saying it correctly, but do we think the sheets were sent to the printer with white names, or with yellow names that the printing process for whatever reason turned white?

I don't know the order of events. Same for the 58 Yellows. Would guess Darren could be right. Whites were run, error discovered and corrected. But maybe two separate printers or print runs since as others have pointed out they are not rare and may have been distributed in certain geographic areas.

The 68 and 69 sets found Topps with new licensing issues with the players as well as the League with the rise of Marvin Miller