Elsewhere on the site, John asks rhetorically if the magnificence of the 1953 Bowman design of superb photography and no art, inspired Topps to go nearly as simple for its landmark 1957 series. I’m a big advocate of the self-evident theory that card designs influence each other over the generations (as I’ll examine below). But in the case of the 1957 Topps set, I think there’s a much simpler and inescapable answer: Topps took its first photos in 1956 and thus in designing the ’57 set it not only had its first set of images it fully and exclusively owned – it also had its first reliable source of new images, ever.
Certainly the ’53 Bowmans were admired then as now. But in real time, what was the Topps design response when the competitor in its life-and-death struggle put out perfectly lit, framed, and printed color cards that nearly glowed? They didn’t try to make a ’54 Topps set evocative of ’53 Bowman. In fact Topps instead started the three year domination of the Giant Repeating Heads of ‘54-55-56. There are lots of admirable elements to the style of those three sets, but you’ve never heard anybody look at them and say “you know, these remind me of 1953 Bowman.”
That Topps bought out Bowman and not the other way around was clearly not the result of graphic artistry. In trying to repeat in ‘54 something reminiscent of ‘53 at a fraction of the cost, Bowman stumbled badly with poorly-colorized black and white photos, printed on the cheap and full of dozens of errors in the stats. But the older company rebounded strongly in ’55 and in fact seemed to finally achieve a way to make a quality card that outshined Topps without bankrupting the company. I don’t remember hearing or reading this anywhere in my first 40 years as a collector, but when I gained access to the Topps photo files circa 2004 I was shocked to find evidence in them that the ’55 Bowman set was also made out of tinted black-and-white photos. Bowman finally figured out how to win, only to lose.
In the post-Bowman-war environment of 1956, obviously Sy Berger decided the kids weren’t going to be fooled by the same shot of Henry Aaron for the fourth straight year. He and the Shorin family also finally got to spend less money on lawyers and could drop a little more on production quality. Berger was also clearly moving Topps towards producing a comprehensive baseball set with everybody in it, improving the football product, and expanding into basketball and (back) into hockey. The easiest solution to a lot of issues was for Topps to take its own player photos and relegate what we might call ‘the Flexichrome route’ of colorizing team-published publicity photos and colorized wire shots and the like, to anybody their photographers missed.
They didn’t miss many. Shooting only in the three New York stadiums in 1956 Topps pretty much got every major league player and had an instant high-quality photographic archive from which they were able to match their largest set to that point, of 407 cards. 1957 Topps is the first nationally issued baseball card set ever to rely on color photography and also try to include virtually every big league player. ’53 Bowman is striking but it’s missing half the players. The thing that made the ambitious ’57 Topps set possible was literally several thousand available color positives. Why overshadow them by imposing unnecessary art work? That has to be why the ’57 design is so unobtrusive.
The interesting thing is that whatever the ’57 idea was (and the more you look at it, it’s clear they tried to carry that over into the ’57-58 basketball set, too) by 1958 Sy Berger had thrown the switch into reverse and eliminated those beautiful ballparks to instead use bright but bland one-color backgrounds. The lore around Topps was always that this was to save kids (and Brooklyn based employees) more grief from having to see images of the abandoned Ebbets Field and Polo Grounds but Sy angrily denied this. Still, inside Topps the design debate (simpler photo versus garish graphics) went back and forth for three decades. The photos rarely won (1961, 1967, 1969; to some degree 1976-80) but you’ll notice how many “special” sets like poster series and inserts and others are basically just giant photos with a small logo on them.
As I mentioned above I am a big believer in designs influencing each other over the generations and clearly 1953 Bowman was one of those influences. When Mike Aronstein made the SSPC cards of 1975, 1976 and 1978 he was not only inspired by ’53 Bowman – he announced it. Our big 1976 set (I wrote the backs) was advertised as “The Pure Card” and if you didn’t compare them to ’53 Bowman we were happy to do it for you at every turn. And Mike was hardly the first to see a card he liked as a kid and grow up to make baseball cards for a living and make his own version of those cards. The T201 Mecca Double Folders of 1911 and Topps 1955 doubleheaders are not a coincidence. ’87 Topps is an homage to the ’62 set. And if you’ve ever seen a reproduction of the giant advertising poster for Old Judges in 1888 it doesn’t show actual Old Judges with their copyrights and cigarette ads and extraordinary photos of players swinging at baseballs suspended on strings from the ceiling. These magnificent pieces of art show color paintings of players with no graphics except the identification of the player by last name and city of his team. They are clearly prototypes for the design of T206 twenty years later. The font on the lettering of the player’s name and team is even the same. Some kid saw that poster and thought: “some day!” Long before retro and classic and heritage became a card thing, designers were borrowing ideas from each other. Lots of Topps’ baseball and football layouts wound up on the soccer cards of their British cousins, A&BC, in the ‘60s. I doubt you have any Scanlen’s Australian Football Cards from the ‘60s but even though they had only a loose affiliation with Topps, for five years at least their flagship set was simply a re-working of a Topps design from a few years previous.
So, did the design of 1953 Bowman inspire the design of 1957 Topps? It would be consistent with the history of baseball card art across three different centuries. But the cards always start with the images and in ’57 Sy Berger suddenly could play with all the photos he could ever want, and I think he just decided to get out of their way.
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