While perusing an excellent Topps Set History page, I ran across an item I hadn’t seen before, a 1965 Topps Baseball box topper described as follows:
This ‘box topper’ would have been folded in three places to create a small square of perhaps 4″ and placed on top of the packs in a wax or cello box. Because it advertises the transfers, we know it was included in at least Series 6 boxes.
Why “at least” Series 6? Well, only Series 6 boxes and wrappers promoted the inserts.
A large photo of the box topper was also shared by the owner on the Net54Baseball forums in May 2025. He explained:
I bought a 1965 empty box at the National show from a guy who was selling baseball World Series DVDs. He didn’t have any baseball cards, just the DVDs and this 1965. The box itself is in great shape! He had the ’65 box and said it was his as a kid. It had the box topper in the box. I was shocked and surprised because I’d never seen anything like it. The box topper is half the dimensions of the 1965 box. It is folded in the middle and would fit nicely inside the box on top of the packs.
He measured it at approximately 4×14 inches. But it turns out he surfaced the box topper online a few years earlier; I just never noticed. A reader pointed it out on the Collectors Forums in 2019, which referred to another net54 post I couldn’t find. In it, the owner said REA had never seen the box topper before, nor had oddball dealer Steve Werley. That thread points out that Topps has a long-running history of using box toppers as promotional inserts.
Happy collecting!
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