Quote:
Originally Posted by Zach Wheat
Drew,
Nice accomplishment. I have not completed the set as I tend to focus on the larger sets first. Were there any rarities within the set? Were there any variations? What was the hardest card to find?
Just curious. Thanks.
Z
|
There aren't any variations in the set. Just the standard 33 cards. 11 in each series. I've seen original advertisements for the set on eBay. If you collected 10 (I think) labels for the dog food cans and mailed them into the company with the postage they would send you one series.
The red ones are short printed but not scarce by any means. The two biggest cards are of course Mantle and then Musial. It's one of the few mid 50's issues of Musial and being a collector of his stuff it is one of my favorites.
Another interesting thing is 11 of the cards in the set are represented by players that ended up in the HOF. That's 1/3 of the set being HOFers! Also I've wondered about team choice. At the time there were 16 major league teams but three are not represented. 10 of the players are from Chicago. 5 from the Cubs and 5 from the Sox. Yankees, Dodgers and Giants are also well represented which makes sense given the era.
I did find that there are more decent conditioned cards out there compared to Topps sets from the same era. Probably because he sets were mailed to you and didn't end up in a kids back pocket or bicycle spikes on the way home from the five and dime.
The biggest issue is centering but it isn't impossible. Overall it was a lot of fun to put together and not too crazy expensive getting bogged down in the commons.
If anyone hasn't ever had any cards from it I would recommend looking into it. It's a great set and I think it represents the 50's style sets very well.
Drew
PS I did want to actually thank Chris, Campyfan39, for his help. He gave me a great deal on the Mantle at well below what I would have paid for a perfectly centered example.