Vintage baseball cards are incredibly popular, but people sometimes forget that baseball card manufacturers had to find original photographs to design the cards around. Here are some original photos of Mickey Mantle that Bowman, Topps, and Wheaties used on some of his earlier baseball cards.
1951 Bowman #253 and 1953 Topps #82 Mickey Mantle Cards
1951 Wheaties Mickey Mantle
1952 Bowman #101 Mickey Mantle
1952 Topps #311 Mickey Mantle
1954 Bowman #65 Mickey Mantle
1956 Topps #135 Mickey Mantle
1958 Topps #487 Mickey Mantle All-Star
1958 Topps World Series Batting Foes Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron
1960 Topps Rival All-Stars Mantle & Boyer
The photo of Mantle and Boyer was taken in 1957, three years before Topps released the popular 1960 Topps Rival All-Stars card.
Happy collecting!
PS: I put this blog post together ~ three years ago and am republishing it. None of these photos are of items in my collection, and I don’t have good records of the auctions/collections I pulled them from.