John

Frank Nagy’s Personal Collection of Hobby Publications

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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.

1934 R135 National Chicle Skybirds Amelia Earhart Original Artwork

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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.

1962/63 Topps Hockey Bucks

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The 1962/63 Topps Hockey Bucks insert set deserves more attention in the hobby as one of the most unusual and low-production vintage Topps hockey issues. These are from Mastro’s December 2004 auction, which was noted as the first time they had offered the thin-paper inserts in one of their catalogs. You still don’t see complete sets that regularly in the hobby.

The 24 hockey bucks were designed to resemble the Canadian currency of the time. One 4-1/8″ x 1-3/16″ bill was vertically folded and fit into each pack.

Upper Deck Promotional Sheet Checklist

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The September 1992 issue of Baseball Cards Magazine is special because it deep-dives into Upper Deck’s earliest years. One of my favorite things they included was this checklist of all the sets, but primarily all of their promotional-sheet issues.

You can read that they credited Don Butler, with the assistance of Jeff Kurowski and Nigel Spill, with putting it together for Sports Collectors Digest.

Here are two of the sheets pictured in the magazine.

Frank Gifford 1959 Bazooka Box

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I’d love to know if a complete (18 + 1 variation) 1959 Bazooka Football Box set run exists in the hobby. Larry Fritsch always said the Chuck Connerly variations were the toughest to track down, but there can only be a few of this Frank Gifford copy that was auctioned off in April 2003.

From a printing perspective, these Bazooka gum boxes first had baseball players on them; football players came later in the fall. The belief is that the Conerly’s, Groza, and Tracy are short prints. That’s mostly a conclusion related to the baseball cards and then football card availability. A forum user wrote, “In early 1959 Topps released a nine card Bazooka baseball card set on the bottom of 25 piece Bazooka gum boxes. The promotion was so popular that they added 14 additional baseball players to the set later in the season. These 14 are short prints. Late in the year, Topps replaced the baseball players on Bazooka boxes with football players. The SP’s are likely ones added later just like the SP’s in the baseball set.”

UPDATE: August 2024. I snapped a photo of a case of football cards while exploring the 2024 National in Cleveland. While perusing the photos in detail while on a business trip, I noticed the following Bazooka Gifford card in one of them!

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