The Industry

There are certain pictures you’ll run across quite often in the hobby, like the 1952 Topps Baseball Woolworth’s display or the 1974 Topps production line photo. Well, there’s another set of images you’ll see a lot from the Topps production line in Duryea, Pennsylvania, during the development, printing, and packaging of the 1991 Topps Baseball set. In this piece, I wanted to save everyone the trouble of tracking them down and share all the photos, plus some information about the magazine they’re from, along with a scan of the complete article; I’ll add a few more details.

Topps Magazine – Winter 1991 – Collectors’s Edition #5

Topps had its own magazine for a few years during the peak of the junk-wax era. The 1991 Topps production images came from an article published in the Winter 1991 edition called Volume 2, Number 1 in the table of contents and Collectors’ Edition #5 on the cover.

The specific article was part of a special section of the magazine highlighting 40 years of Topps Baseball cards. The other pieces in this section are fantastic, covering the beginning of Topps baseball cards, a factory tour in Duryea, photos of a card from each Topps set, a look at the key players from each decade, plus a pair of articles dedicated to the classic 1952 Topps set.

A Day In Duryea Overview

The article dedicated to the tour of the Topps baseball factory is just a two-page spread on pages 32 and 33; I’ve included complete scans at the end of this article. They start by explaining that Duryea is a small town south of Scranton with a population of just 5415 but that, since 1965, it’s where Topps has produced its baseball cards. The factory was described as 450k sq. ft., operating three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Then they explained that development of the set began in January 1990 at Topps HQ in Brooklyn, where the Sports Department assigned photographers to shoot players at spring training to capture action shots. All the while, card design options were developed/submitted, and, presumably, an executive selected one of them in the summer. Then, Mike Drewniak (GM in Duryea) set the production schedule. By November, the Sports Department had sifted through photos, and stats/bios were written. The art staff prepared twelve giant boards, each with 66 card fronts and backs, and the cards got okayed.

That’s when the article’s tour begins, and Drewniak and Quality Control Manager Ron Werner explain the production process step-by-step.

Metal Printing Plates

Each of the four pieces of color film (black, blue, red, yellow) is inspected before being developed onto metal printing plates.

Printing

Five four-color presses print sheets of cards around the clock.

Samples Are Pulled

As uncut sheets come off the end of the press, samples are pulled.

Checks

Those samples are checked to ensure the inks and varnish spread evenly.

Cutters

Stacks of uncut sheets are shipped to the cutting and collating department. The sheets are fed into slitting machines, which cut and collate individual cards. 

Cards Are Stacked

Individual cards are stacked into coded boxes and sent to the packaging department. 

Plastic Wrap

On this particular day, the plant was testing a new plastic wrap called polypropylene, which later that year was used for its 50-cent packs instead of a wax wrap that historically stained cards.

Heat Sealing

The packs were heat-sealed and stacked into retail boxes. 

Shipping Cartons

The boxes were then placed in corrugated shipping cartons (cases).

Shipping Department

The cases were then sent to the shipping department, where trucks would carry them to distribution centers nationwide.

This photo of hundreds of cases in the factory is one of the images you’ll see most often and shows how many cards were printed in 1991. It’s said Topps printed 4-5 million of each card!

In the photo, you can see a bunch of wax cases and what I think are cases that held the “rarer” $1.49 40-card packs.

A Day In Duryea Complete Article