The Quest for the 1960 Topps Set, Page 1
July 6th, 2011 by slangon
I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I’m under the impression that most people, when they’re trying to complete a set, will initially figure out how many 9 pocket pages it will take to house that set, throw that many pages in a binder, and fill in the pages with the cards they have while leaving blank pockets for the cards that they don’t have. Makes sense, right? When I decided to chase the 1960 Topps set, that is exactly how I did not do it. I forget how many 1960 cards I had when I decided to go for the set, but let’s say it was 20. I got a binder and filled it with 3 pages to house my 20 cards. I stuck them in there all willy-nilly. As I got more cards, I would just add more pages as I needed them. As you can guess, the order of the cards was all over the place, with 7th series cards living next door to 2nd series cards sandwiched between 5th and 1st series cards. If you were any kind of obsessive compulsive collector, it was enough to give you fits.
Another side effect to that is that I had no idea that I actually completed the first page of the set, until I randomly decided to put the cards that I have in order. This one got polished off a few weeks ago when I finally found that Faye Throneberry card in the virtual 50ยข bin that is Sportlots.
I don’t know if Dayf has a copyright on the joy of a completed page, but I thought I’d show off at least this one page. It’s kind of a milestone for me that I’m pretty proud of. There’s something really satisfying about looking at a full page of vintage cards and knowing that that page contains cards 1 through 9 in a set. Of course since this is the 1960 set that we’re talking about, which is roughly 93% horizontally oriented, when you look at the page the way I’m showing it here, it’s not in order unless you start from the bottom left, which is not the way most people read.
The backs look really cool together as well, although when you look at them horizontally like this, as opposed to they way the sheet would normally sit in a binder, it becomes pretty glaring that they’re not really in order. Maybe I should rethink the way I put them in there. Either way, one page down, 62 and a half to go.
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