Production Estimates / Print Run Archive

[Estil17]

Originally Posted by Mark17

Has it been made clear whether the numbers are raw total, or number of sets (number of each card.) You have 2,500,000 for 1987 Topps. I personally broke almost 600 vending cases that year (6 million+ total cards) which would be about 9,000 of each card. One customer bought 4,500 each of about 30 different players in one massive purchase.

I remember, years ago, somebody was finding Topps production info from shareholder publications.

It can't be that easy...I mean back in the day I thought production numbers were treated as top secret as nuclear launch codes? And to answer your previous question that's 2.5M of each card. Which might sound like a lot but it wouldn't even be enough for everyone in my state (KY) to have one!

[Mark17]

Originally Posted by Estil17

It can't be that easy...I mean back in the day I thought production numbers were treated as top secret as nuclear launch codes? And to answer your previous question that's 2.5M of each card. Which might sound like a lot but it wouldn't even be enough for everyone in my state (KY) to have one!

There are certain legal disclosures a public company needs to make public to its shareholders. There was a guy in the 1980s who wrote a few articles in SCD, where he extrapolated production information from the shareholder annual reports he received.

From Wikipedia:
After being privately held for several decades, Topps offered stock to the public for the first time in 1972 with the assistance of investment banking firm White, Weld & Co. The company returned to private ownership when it was acquired in a leveraged buyout led by Forstmann Little & Company in 1984. The new ownership group again made Topps into a publicly traded company in 1987, now renamed to The Topps Company, Inc. In this incarnation, the company was reincorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law for legal reasons, but company headquarters remained in New York. Management was left in the hands of the Shorin family throughout all of these maneuverings.

On October 12, 2007, Topps was acquired by Michael Eisner's The Tornante Company and Madison Dearborn Partners.

[Estil17]

Has anyone been able to at least guesstimate how many football and b-ball cards were produced from 80s or earlier? I'm really curious about that.