1975 to 1979 Hostess observations

[David W]

I have been putting the Hostess sets together from 1975 to 1979 over the last 6 months or so. A fellow collector friend and myself have been buying bulk lots on Ebay and elsewhere,and beginning the process of assembling these sets.

Some of the cards were printed on less popular product, so finding a 1975 Gibson, or 1979 Nolan Ryan or Ozzie Smith pose challenges, but I am finding a few other possible oddities as well.

I am not really working on a Twinkie only series of sets, they have their own numerous variations.

Aside from the obvious condition problems from dull scissors and 10 year old kids, and the Twinkie stains on the individual packaged Twinkies, here are some anecdotal observations on these sets.


1 - 1975 is by far the most common, with 1976 and 1977 also being pretty easy to find. The Robin Yount rookie is not tough at all. The error cards are also relatively tough to find, but not impossible. (Madlock, Hooton, Yaz, and Rader). There are also several uncorrected errors. Milt May/Lee May, Mike Sundberg, George Hendricks, Craig Nettles and possibly more.

2 - The brown backs are really tough. Not all cards have brown printed stats on the back, and I don't have any for 1977, so perhaps only 1975, 76, 78, 79 were printed in brown instead of black.

3 - The higher numbers are harder to find, specifically the cards numbered over about 100. I'm about 2/3 of the way to completion, and the majority by far, I would estimate 75% are numbers above 100. Since numbers 100 to 150 are only 1/3 of the set, this seems to indicate a much lower card run. This seems uniform across the sets.

4 - 1978 is harder to find than 1975-77, but 1979 appears to have the lowest number of printed cards.

Here are scans of some brown backs next to the normal black printed backs for comparison. There is also a scan of Bill Madlock listed as a pitcher and some print defects that have come in as well.

Thoughts or comments appreciated.