Posted By:
Jason Lthere are probably a series of questions that could be strung together in an effort to estimate production numbers for various vintage card sets...
And I would think that if no company documents exist, you may be able to ballpark production based on estimated company sales figures for the products that the cards were packaged with...? and other variables such as distribution geographies, population, etc...but of course, this will be an extreme academic exercise that wouldn't yield as satisfying a result as simply trying to estimate how many of each card still exist, or at least still circulate (an even smaller subset)...
idle thoughts for a Friday lunch at my desk!
A not-terribly-related question: How many of you have ever thrown away cards? I'll go first. I got so disgusted with the way the hobby was going in 1988 with the proliferation of sets and over-printing, etc, I looked at my dozens of boxes of commons and uncompleted sets (1985-1988 topps), I took out the HOFers, and then dumped thousands of cards in the trash, figuring the storage space carried a larger premium than what I was filling it with!!! This was the light bulb going off in my head about scarcity and relative value. And the fact that no one else wanted them helped trigger the epiphany...because that is the definition of garbage: stuff that no one else wants