Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
Here’s a gem from the past: a 1952 Topps Baseball High Numbers Partial Uncut Sheet featuring Eddie Mathews in the lower right corner. It’s been a while since I’ve spotted this beauty in the hobby.
While just a partial sheet, it’s pretty rare to find 25 1952 Topps high-number cards together, let alone in an uncut 5×5 grid! The sheet’s overall condition was described as “Very Good” in the lot’s description in Mastro’s November 2000 Fine Sports Auction catalog.
Over my years studying the post-war hobby, I can’t recall ever reading about the 1961 National City Bank Cleveland Browns set. The priciest card to sell from it is this PSA 9 Jim Brown, which sold for just over $20k in Memory Lane’s Summer 2022 Auction.
National City Bank released the 36-card set in sheets of six to depositors in the bank’s Quarterback Club.
Besides the Jim Brown, the set’s most desirable cards include the Quarterback Club Membership Card, Len Dawson, Lou Groza, and Bobby Mitchell.
Naturally, since drafting this post, I’ve been seeing these cards everywhere!
Here’s some hobby-show history from March 1982, when you could get a Hank Aaron autograph for $5!
The advertisement for the “East Coast’s Newest and Largest Show..Sports & Paper Collectible Show and Sale” in White Plains, NY, was scanned from the February 1982 issue of Trader Speaks.
And here’s what may be the coolest Hank Aaron signed items in the hobby: a signed ticket stub from the game where he hit his 715th home run to pass Babe Ruth.
I recently discovered that this 1961 Post Cereal baseball advertising display sign existed when I found it inside an auction catalog from April 2000.
The cardboard sign was described as being a 28” circular heavy cardboard sign with blow-up pictures of nine 1961 Post Cereal cards, including Willie Mays (autographed) Whitey Ford, Nelson Fox, Roy Face, Pete Runnels, Lew Burdette, Ken Boyer, Jim Gentile, and Jim Lemon.
The auction presumed that some printed advertising in the center was probably missing.
It appears that Collect Auctions re-sold the same sign in November 2018 for $1160. They included this close-up of the Mays card (with a Beckett Authentication Service endorsement).
How cool is this giant vintage Wonder Bread cardboard sign? It’s dated to the late ‘50s and pictures eight of the era’s biggest stars in “floating” headshot style, including Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Elston Howard, Warren Spahn, Stan Musial, Paul Hornung, Del Shofner, and Sam Huff.
The December 2001 auction lot described the cardboard display as “thick” and 46 x 34 inches.
I wish I had already been building the hobby library in 2005 when Frank Nagy’s personal collection of hobby publications was offered for sale.
You can see a few incredible examples in the photos of The Sport Hobbyist, The Sport Card Journal, The Trading News, Card Comments, The Trader Speaks, The Old Judge, The Sport Hobbyist and Journal, and Sports Collectors Digest among the 721 “choice early hobby pubs.”
Funny enough, Collect Auctions just sold a similarly impressive lot of vintage hobby pubs and guides in their auction that ended on April 4, 2024. Among its 366 items, it offered, I believe, three copies of Richard Egan’s Handbook to Early Card & Gum Baseball. The final price was $1626.
No matter how fancy you think your collection is, something always stops you in your tracks.
Here’s the original artwork used for the 1934 R135 National Chicle Skybirds #48 Amelia Earhart card.
Mastro auctioned it off in their April 2004 catalog. The painted piece was described as rendered on the 4-1/2″ x 5-1/2″ lower-left area of a 6″ x 7″ artists’ board with handwritten editorial notes in the margins. The back is blank and has some adhesive residue on it.
After I shared the piece on social media, Number5TypeCard shared the following photo of the collectible from the 2015 National, which was for sale for $15k.
