1987 Fleer Glossy Brown backs

[ALR-bishop]

It is not a factory set.

[HasselhoffsCheeseburger]

So now I'm wondering if they're available in packs. Makes no sense that someone would take a regular factory set, remove it from the box, and then sell it as a hand-collated set. The '87 Fleer factory sets had no factory seal to them so it's not like anyone would have been able to tell if they went through it or not. Your set must have been put together with cards pulled from packs.

Arthur

[ALR-bishop]

I know I bought it from Sport Cards + but know nothing about how they put the set together

[frankbmd]

Imagine trying to put a brown back set together.

Al, your retirement agenda is complete.

[Exhibitman]

Topps used two different stocks in its 1977 basketball set, the normal bright white and the occasional dark.

I found a similar anomaly in 1992 Topps football:



I think they just put the occasional wrong sheet of card stock into the press.

[Pat R]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Topps used two different stocks in its 1977 basketball set, the normal bright white and the occasional dark.

I found a similar anomaly in 1992 Topps football:



I think they just put the occasional wrong sheet of card stock into the press.

Adam, is topps printed in green/blue on the back of the darker one?

[Troy Kirk]

I had a few minutes, so I went through a box of about 1000 Fleer 1987 regular cards. I didn't find any brown ones until the last card, #660. I found another #660 and it is also brown. I don't think any of my other cards are brown. Not sure what this all means, but thought I would contribute.

[HasselhoffsCheeseburger]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

I think they just put the occasional wrong sheet of card stock into the press.

That was my initial assumption as well. But we're talking about an extremely large amount of cards printed with this stock. Even if we assume that it's just a coincidence that the two people that have checked their sets have found one in each, three sets in total coming from three different vendors, we're talking about two entirely different print runs in the regular non-glossy Fleer that was issued in packs and factory sets and the Fleer Glossy print run that was only issued in the special factory tin sets.

The odds that this is an occasional sheet slipping in and it happening in both print runs and both Al and I getting them in all 3 sets are probably around the odds of you getting attacked by a great white shark and a grizzly bear simultaneously.

I think we need to find out if this is isolated to this one sheet or if the entire set is available. That will go a long way in determining what happened. I'm not sure how Fleer printed their '87 set. I don't know if they farmed out the job to different printers or if it was all done in-house somewhere.

It's certainly perplexing how the three sets seem to suggest a good amount of these cards were produced yet each set only contained one card.

I think at this point though, I'm going with the theory that Fleer took quantities of regular, non-glossy sheets of their cards and then applied gloss to them in order to build their Glossy tin sets. As opposed to doing a separate and unique print run. That would at least explain why the cards are found in regular and Glossy format.

The only picture I have of the sheet with Canseco/Lansford/Aguilera is very small and therefore quite blurry when I blow it up to see who else is on it. But, I'm fairly certain Puckett, Pete Rose, and Kevin Mitchell are also on the sheet if anyone has large quantities of any of those players' '87 Fleer card to check.

Arthur

[Exhibitman]

Yeah, Patrick, but that's not it; the cards I used to illustrate are regular and gold trimmed. The latter is on the same stock as the regular issue but has a gold Topps water mark. Every regular I went through was standard white stock except the Elway.

[88horsepower]

Just last week I opened a box of 1987 Leaf Baseball and noticed a similar issue with several cards. Some of the card backs are white backs and some almost appear to be missing a dark hue. I'll post some pictures later, but both variations were found of the same card in the same box. Very strange.