One of the fun things about looking through old hobby publications from the 1950s and 1960s is seeing what collectors at the time thought about now-vintage card sets when they were first coming out. The first two articles below are from the March 1957 issue of The Sport Hobbyist. In the first, editor Charles Brooks shares what he had learned about the forthcoming 1957 Topps baseball cards; he said that there would be 352 cards in the set, but in the end there were 407. In the second article, based on a report he got on March 22 while he was putting the issue together, Brooks described the cards, including their new smaller size (vs. the larger 1952-56 Topps) and the year-by-year stats on the back, which was a novelty. He also gave a checklist of the first two series.
The third article below is from the Summer 1958 issue of The Sport Hobbyist, the first one to come out in 10 months. (As Brooks explained elsewhere in the issue, he had gone away to college in the fall of 1957 and was busy with his studies.) Here Brooks surveys the various sports card sets Topps had issued in recent months, including the 1957-58 basketball and hockey cards, before giving a checklist for the first 176 cards in the baseball set and estimating the schedule for the remaining series. He thought there would be 407 to 429 cards in the set, but in fact there were 495.
The last article below is from the January-February 1964 Sport Hobbyist, which was actually published in July. (The publication schedule in 1963-64 was very erratic, and I think this was the last issue published before Brooks revived the paper in 1971.) This is a review by Buck Barker of the new 1964 Topps baseball cards, interspersed with cracks about the Beatles, since Beatlemania was in full swing at the time. He estimated that there would be 600 cards in the set (there were actually 587), and he liked the designs, both front and back, as well as the baseball coins that came in every pack.
