Questions on 53' Bowman sets

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Posted By: Pcelli60

I love the 53' Bowman color set. But does anyone buy the argument that it 'busted' the company? Does the switch to B&W in the same year prove this? How about a few thoughts on this..Thanks guys..

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Posted By: dennis

this small article is from the psa board. and whats said makes more sense. they did stay in business for another 2 years. i think topps just was bigger and bought them out.the topps issues of 54 & 55 had a lot of color and kids probably liked them better. i'm sure someone here bought cards in those years and has an opinion.http://www.psacard.com/articles/article_view.chtml?universeid=314&artid=2209

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Posted By: warshawlaw

The idea that the printing costs were much higher for these cards than for other cards from the era has been repeated for years but without any support. Remember, the cards are not photographs printed on photo paper; they are printed matter (David, wanna jump in here with some astute observations as to techniques?), same as the prior years' cards. Look at them under a magnifier and you can see all the little dots. I would even guess that these cards cost less to produce than the drawn cards because the drawn cards had full color too and had to be created from photos (and an artist paid to do it).

I have no idea why they'd do a B&W set too; maybe they were testing it out as an idea, or maybe someone thought that B&W looked really nice and wanted to see if it would sell. One thing is for sure, which is that there are far fewer B&W cards out there than color cards, which kind of contradicts the idea that the cards were issued to replace the color cards--wouldn't you expect more of them rather than fewer?

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Posted By: Peter Thomas

As some of you know I started buying 48 Leafs, which I loved probably because they were comic book like in appearance. I don't even remenmber 48 Bowmans. In 49 I still bought the Leafs and some
Bowmans, which I did not much care for, although I like them now. In 50 and 51 I bought Bowmans, but will little enthusium. The 52 Topps blew me away and I was scrambling for pop bottles to get them like I was in 48 for the Leafs - don't think I bought many Bowmans. In 53 The Bowman color cards also blew me away and I collected them although I don't remember the Black and White cards. In 54 I collected both Bowmans and Topps, but was leaning back to Topps. During the summer of 55 we moved and Cashman's store on the Boston/Worchester Pike (Route 9) in Natick was out of my reach, but until my move I was collecting Topps and Cashmans was selling so few of the ugly 55 Bowmans that they stopped carring them.