CARDINALS - 1975 Topps MINI Near Complete Team Set (24/25)
With Hall-of-Famers:Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Ted Simmons & Red Schoendienst. Missing only common #398. (stock photo)| Grade | NM/MINT to MINT |
|---|---|
| Book Value | n/a |
| Our Price |
$ 95
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|
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on vintage baseball, football, basketball, hockey, sport and non-sports cards.
1968 Topps Action All-Star Stickers
Another one of my favorite Topps test issues !!!
In 1968, trying to catch the fancy of young collectors, Topps issued a set of
"Baseball Action Stickers", also called "Action All-Stars Stickers".
1968 was a huge year for Topps with their test/oddball issues of
Game cards, Player Posters, 3-D cards, Plaks, Discs and Punchouts. |
Sold in 1-sticker packs in 1968 with 12 packs/box; at ten cents a pack, sets could be put together
for just $1.60. Today, if you could find them, a mid four figures or more would be needed to build a set.
Today a complete 3-panel sticker with Mantle in the center commands up to $2,000 alone. 
The single panels themselves are quite scarce and in the 23 years PSA has been
around they have graded just over 200 TOTAL, less than 9 per year !!!
The pop report is on the average of only 4 to 5 of each individual panel !!!
Compare that to PSA has graded over a thousand 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles !!!
Vintage Topps collectors understand supply and demand and just how cool
these are ! 
O-Pee-Chee (OPC) based in Ontario Canada, is mostly thought of as the Canadian version of Topps but it actually pre-dates Topps by many years.
In 1933, OPC issued their first sports card set, the V304 Hockey cards and is currently in the tens of thousands. Their first baseball set was issued in 1937. It was similar to the 1934 Goudeys and Batter-Ups and the top player was Joe Dimaggio.
O-Pee-Chee created baseball card sets similar to TOpps from 1965 into the 1990's. At first OPC sets were much smaller than Topps and included just the first few series. Fronts & backs were nearly identical but with a small "Printed in Canada" on the back and the card stock was slightly different.
Baseball being much less popular in Canada, OPC print runs of their early years were between 1% and 10% of Topps making them exceedingly scarce !!!
Starting in 1970, Canadian legislation demanded all items produced in Canada
carry both French & English so OPC baseball cards became bilingual with both
languages included.
Other OPC differences include:
1971, OPC even changed the back design to a much more
interesting back and also offered 14 different card photos not in the Topps set.
1972 OPC included a card of Gil Hodges mentioning his death that was
not a part of the Topps set.
1974 OPC did not include any "Washington Nationals" variations.
1977 the card format remained like Topps but almost 1/3 of the OPC set had
different poses/images than Topps.
In late 1970's, OPC card fronts appeared similar to Topps but sometimes
included traded information saying "Now with XXXX". They were able to do
this as the OPC cards were printed much later into the season.
