Vintage Bowman Football, '51, '52 small question

akuracy503

Although I've stopped collecting football as a kid I'm starting to really appreciate and taking a liking to these '51 '52 small bowman football sets, beautiful, more so than the baseball counterparts in there own way.

My question is how difficult is it to collect these in mid grade? I don't see much opportunity to buy these sets from the recent auction house listings and ebay has what it seems overpriced sets as BIN's.

Care to share your thoughts and PM's are welcome if you have secret information.

BigDaddyBowman

I am building the 51 Bowman set in SGC 7 and 8...need about 35 commons to complete. I have enjoyed the journey because the cards are great looking, a lot of star power, no shortprints demanding crazy prices, and the cards are available but just tough enough to make the hunt fun. You will have little trouble finding mid grade cards. On the other hand, the 52 smalls are much more scarce. They get overlooked by a lot of collectors by their "Big Brothers" so demand is much less then the large so prices are not insane like the large. I say go for it...you will enjoy the ride.

Mickey71

Absolutely beautiful cards. The 51 and 52 Bowman. I'm not a serious football collector but those are really cool.

UlyssesExtravaganza

I love the 51 Bowman set and started collecting it seriously early this year in 7 and 8 condition. So I'm in the same boat with starting to really appreciate them. I've got around 14 graded and 14 raw and am working patiently to build it to a complete set. I love the artwork of the cards and the opportunity to get some of the great pioneers of the game at what I consider to be a very reasonable price. My observations with the 7 and 8 and 9 grades are that the auctions are almost always a much better deal than the BINs. As you say, the majority of BINs seem to be set pretty high and then auctions end up with a final price at about 60% to 70% of the BIN prices. Don't know if that would be case with other grades. As far as trying to get a set, I recently went to a reasonably big show in Chantilly, VA and saw a ton of tables with big stacks of 51 Bowman in the Very Good to Near Mint range. The list price at shows seems higher than eBay but if you were looking to get 5 or more from a particular dealer you could probably end up negotiating and getting a good deal. I think I could have walked out of that show with 90-95% of the set if I was looking to do that on that day. When I started collecting this set, wcsports was selling every card in the set individually as a set break so you might be able to luck out and hit on one of those in your grade range as well. I've loved doing the research on some of these players and checking out the Wikipedia profiles. A lot of interesting stories. I love the Steve Van Buren write-up. They said he didn't show up for the championship game because it was raining and he thought it was cancelled. So they tracked him down and got him there in time and he had one of the greatest games of all time, running for like 190 yards in a winning effort.