1950's & 60's Topps Card Populations?

[sflayank]

Yep
I was looking at the 60s instead of the 600 in each set
So 2 to 3 %
Ie..1963. 5000 mantles
So should be 5000 of everything
Maybe less hi#s more low #s
Maybe more mantles were saved but #s left should be close

[ALR-bishop]

I think it has been discussed here before and maybe Dave Hornish had some input. In researching the Topps and Fleer legal battles in the 60s I came across some figures in some published FTC cases that Fleer filed against Topps, and posted some of them somewhere but have no idea where now

[sflayank]

Lemke did a blog on it years ago
I recall it was from 59 60 61
The # I believe was 150 million it was based on topps sales reports and revenue
Check the mantle pop reports and multiply by # of cards in set
Also # went up as population of country grew

[ALR-bishop]

Good recall Larry

https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A2KI...t9sE5mSHpJeFM-

[ALBB]

Wow,
I thought way way more then that

Didn't somewhere they talked about 30s Goudey cards..and said - 3 million of each card back this those days ??

[tulsaboy]

The other interesting question that follows from those numbers, if we adopt the idea that 2-3% of each particular card have survived (though I think there is an argument that more of the "stars" like Mantle and Mays survived because they were treasured and/or kept separate of the others), how many would you have to hoard to impact the price? I'm thinking of some of the known examples where people have tried to gather up as many of a particular card as possible. Would you need 2000? 3000? And how would you successfully acquire that many of a particular card quietly? I think that there are lots of each stuck in folks' complete set runs that won't emerge or be available for sale no matter how high the price.
kevin

[mckinneyj]

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/1...-baseball-card

As of 2014 one hoarder had accumulated over 4k 1964 Topps Curt Floods - still a lot of 'em out there but the price is out of proportion to the rest of the set. fwiw...

[ALR-bishop]

The Flood guy takes 2nd place to what the guy hoarding the 52 Bartirome has done to the price of that card

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by mckinneyj

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/1...-baseball-card

As of 2014 one hoarder had accumulated over 4k 1964 Topps Curt Floods - still a lot of 'em out there but the price is out of proportion to the rest of the set. fwiw...

There is another 1960's Topps card that is heavily collected by a fellow board member. As active as he has been at collecting this card over the past 10+ years, my guess is he has exceeded the count that the Flood collector achieved (as he no longer appears to be actively collecting the Flood card).


Just like there are still a deluge of Floods out there, there are likely still a plethora of this other card out there. 5K of each card from the 60s seems exceptionally low (even for the higher numbers).

1952 Topps higher numbers have an estimated 5-10K copies that made it into circulation and with attrition amongst collectors, estimates are that between 2-3k of each of the 52 Hi#s remain based on pop counts.

I would agree that in the 60s that there were around 250k of each card produced by Topps....however, the percent remaining is much higher than 2-3%