Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
This has to be the most incredible grouping of 1966 O-Pee-Chee Batman card collectibles the hobby has ever seen. Two display boxes, 58 packs, 10 sets, 218 singles, and 11 uncut sheets.
Mastro offered the lot in their April 2004 Americana Premier Catalog Auction.
Check out The Uncut Sheet Archive for more!
You’ll occasionally find a 1952 Topps Wings cello pack for sale, but wax is far scarcer. So I was pretty surprised when I ran across this nearly complete 5-cent wax box from an April 2004 auction catalog.
This lot was for a “marvelously well-preserved, two-part Wings display box that once held thirty-six 5-cent packs of the aviation-themed treasures. Thirty of the unopened wax packs are still nestled inside and, with their 8” x 5-5/8”x 1-1/2” lidded counter-sales box, they recreate the vision of a confectioners display from more than a half-century ago.”
The box was described as Near Mint and the packs as Excellent to Mint. The lot also included this flattened wrapper.
As far as I can tell, PSA has only slabbed two 1952 Topps Wings wax packs: the following PSA 7 and another graded 8, which includes a 5-cent designation on the flip. There are 30 cello packs in the Pop Report.
However, The Baseball Card Exchange did offer this “1952 Topps Wings Wax Unopened Box (1 Cent)(120 Packs)” for sale on their website for $16k a while ago, and there are a few GAI-slabbed wax packs, too.
Check out The Unopened Archive for more!
This is a one-of-a-kind production relic for the five-cent wrapper for the 1965 Topps Battle series. Ex-Topps Vault.
I presume Mastro was the first auction house to sell this item after the consignor acquired it from Topps Vault. They wrote it up as printed on glossy paper, measuring 11-1/8” x 10” with penciled-in editorial notes.
After a quick Google search and perhaps a few more owners (who knows!), Hake’s Auctions re-sold it in March 2013 for $172. The editorial note on this scan says, “Fill in white shots on blue plate” referring to the white dots above the black square advertising an “Extra Military Emblem In Each Pack.”
While the following 1965 Topps Battle wrapper has a different advertisement on the left-hand side, the white dots were removed.
Hake’s included the following scan of the official COA from the Topps Vault.
Check out The Unopened Archive for more!
I shared a nifty 1967 Topps Who Am I Proof Paul McCartney card the other day; on the same page of the auction (two lots later) was one of the remaining unopened boxes!
It remains a pricey box; REA sold one for $5925 in their Spring 2013 catalog.
More recently, BBCE offered this one on their site, which they authenticated, for $29k.
For completeness, here’s a wax wrapper.
Check out The Unopened Archive for more!
I ran across this 1967 Topps “Who Am I?”-style test proof card of Paul McCartney in Mastro’s American Premier Catalog Auction that featured the “Topps West Coast Archive.”
You can see that GAI graded the card as Mint 9 and added the “1st Graded” notation. Goldin sold another McCartney proof card with a “1st Graded” notation in January 2021 for $540, but curiously, it’s graded NM-MT 8. I suppose there are subtle differences in the quote block (like the Fred Newman cards pictured below).
The set’s checklist ended up at 44, but Topps did a lot of experimenting. In the spring of 2017, REA sold an uncut sheet of the test issue for $1680. In the description, they wrote, “Presented on this sheet are twelve cards (printed twice) which were not included in the final production of the set, and were created by Topps specifically as test proof cards. These twelve cards never saw public distribution, and were produced utilizing materials for internal use only, as a test design concept for a set that was, of course, fully executed.”
Notice the 1967 Topps Baseball cards?
The sheet features Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, two different poses of Lyndon B. Johnson (one as Senator and one as President), Robert Vaughn, David McCallum, Bob Bruce, Dean Chance, Al Dark, Jimmie Hall, Lee Elia, and Fred Newman.
REA has also sold a handful of GAI-graded proof cards with the same GAI notations as the McCartney and a pair in Topps Vault cases.
Non-sport seems to be getting a lot of hype these days, so I thought I’d share this cool auction from April 2004 of a 1969 Topps and O-Pee-Chee “Man on the Moon” wax boxes! As the lot said, space exploration was at the forefront of the nation’s consciousness during the late 1960’s.
The 1969 Topps Man on the Moon 24-count display box contained 24 ten-cent wax packs, while the 1969 O-Pee-Chee Man on the Moon box originally contained 36 5-cent packs (the box in this auction was incomplete with just 30 packs).
“Real Photos Of Men On The Moon!”
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The 1949 Bowman America Salutes the FBI set is one that I only recently discovered while browsing an auction catalog from November 1998 and ran across a photo of the wax wrapper.
Here’s a photo of the front and back of the first card in the set that I grabbed from PSA’s Gallery.
Isn’t it interesting how closely the back resembles its baseball cousin?
Check out The Unopened Archive for more!