The Quest for the 1960 Topps Set, Part II
April 1st, 2010 by slangon

Initially I was going to pull an April Fools prank on you guys by claiming that I was going to switch my collecting focus to fishing lures, but someone beat me to that punch. So instead, I’ll catch up a little bit and post about a few more 1960 Topps cards that I was able to score off of eBay.

These all came from the same seller, so I was able to keep shipping costs to a minimum. They were all cards that started at $0.99 and had no bids with maybe an hour or so left to go. I didn’t go too high on anything. I think I made my high bid $1.36 or some odd number like that. Thankfully, no one else bid, so I was able to get all 5 cards for basically a buck a pop.

First up is a pair of team cards / checklists.

Some eagle eyed readers out there might have caught the fact that this is actually the second copy of that ChiSox card that I’ve gotten recently. This is a little disturbing in that this is the third time in the last few weeks that I’ve bought a card without referencing the checklists that I’ve spent so much time setting up just so that things like this don’t happen. I really need to stop doing that.

This is actually a good time to point out an interesting thing about the 1960 set. Like every other Topps set put out prior to 1974, the 1960 set was issued over the course of the year in series. This particular set had a total of 7 series. The breakdown is thus:

Series 1: 1-88
Series 2: 89-176
Series 3: 177-264
Series 4: 265-352
Series 5: 353-429
Series 6: 430-495
Series 7: 496-572

I would love to find any info regarding the approximate dates that the series were realeased, but so far have come up empty on that front. Anyway, one of the weird things they did was to alternate the cardboard stock they used on each series. Series 1 could be found on white or cream card stock whereas Series 2 was printed on grayish cardboard.

They kept alternating in that way throughout the entire set. The only exception to this was that cards 375-440 could be found on both types. Additionally, at least on the base player cards, the players name could be printed in either black letters, or dropped out so that the gray cardboard showed through.

Next up is card #1.

Card #1 happens to be Hall of Famer Early Wynn, who won an impressive 22 games the year before. I thought that I had read somewhere that with many vintage sets, the first card and the last card are often worth more since kids would usually stack up the cards and bind them with rubber bands. This meant that the first and last cards usually bore the brunt of the rubber bands wrath. As you can see, this particular Early Wynn card has borne the wrath of more than just rubber bands. I did see that this card books for about 10 times what commons from this series do, so I’m curious as to how much of that is that it’s card #1 and how much is that it’s a Hall of Famer.

Another feature of the 1960 set is the various multi-player cards. I was able to pick up two that feature some pretty big players.

I know that these are easier and cheaper to track down than Willie and Warrens base cards, but it still feels good to be able to cross them off the list. Both are in pretty nice shape as well. I don’t think I’d call them mint by any means, but they’re still a sight better than most of the old cards that I get.

One Response to “The Quest for the 1960 Topps Set, Part II”

  1. I really like that set! Top 3 of the decade easy. I have all of those but the Mays one. That has always been very pricy whenever I have seen it. If you got it for a couple bucks you got a steal!

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