Printing Runs

stormsurge

Is there a resource out there that can tell you how big the printing runs were by year and card maker?

easttexascardsandgames

Not that I am aware of there is not, that is one thing the major companies were always kin of secretive about.

5thScaleRacer

thats Topp Secret information

Griffins

I believe VCBC ran a series of articles on this a few years back, I don't have access to the magazines right now, but perhaps someone else does. It is pretty secretive but someone what was considered to be a good estimation was made of Topps thru about '75

5thScaleRacer

I believe there was a report that 1985 Topps babseball was reported at 1 million

magellan

From The Great American Baseball card Flipping, Trading, & Bubble Gum Book " We sold 20 million packages of baseball cards last year" - Sy Berger

He was talking about 1972 . At 10 cards per pack , that's 200 million cards (just baseball) and with the huge size of that set still works out to over 250 thousand cards of each player. In 1985 I suspect 1 million card production run refers to that many of each card printed.

Dave S.

stevek

<<< Is there a resource out there that can tell you how big the printing runs were by year and card maker? >>>

Baseball cards aren't like coins whereby the US Mint publicly announces each year how many coins were minted. Sometimes with cards, printing runs are announced on limited edition sets such as "5,000 sets," etc. The printing runs for their regular cards I have never seen announced by any card company.

Billa

I read an article 15 to 20 years ago that focused on the survival of cards printed by Topps. The article stated that in the late 50s and 60s, they printed a million of each card and then the article went on to suggest how many of those cards survived. It was interesting that they took one year of cards, broke it down into five cent packs, number of packs per box and number of boxes per case, and then estimated the distribution across the towns and states. At the beginning of the article I thought one million of each card was a high estimate, however when you look at the number of towns, etc., it didn't seem like a lot. And then, for about five straight years, I ran ads in the local newspaper to buy cards 1960 and before. In my town of about 7,000 people, I got maybe two or three calls over those five years. And, for example, picked up a 1955 Bowman Mantle, and a two 1960 Mantles. One gentleman did have his childhood collection of 1951, 1952 Bowmans and 1953 Topps, but that was it. So, as the article suggested, and by PSA population reports, many of the cards went the way of the garbage and bicycle spokes. In my neighborhood for example, we had a small store that would get each series of Topps cards in throughout the summer, but the store owner would maybe have 10-12 boxes of each series.

helionaut

I have a book on baseball trivia and history (The Baseball Catalog) and somewhere in there there's a quote from Sy Berger or someone like that that said in 1975 they produced 375,000 copies of each card. That may be some round number not entirely accurate, but I'll go with it.

stormsurge

Thanks for your comments everyone! Interesting thread.