1961 Spokane Indians cards
 

Anyone know how I can find out the size of the print run of the '61 Pacific Coast League Spokane Indians cards? I came into a handful of them and am curious just how big the print runs were (I work in the printing industry, so it got me to wondering.)

I was able to figure out that one of them is a short print (SP) so I'm curious just how many less of the SP cards there were.

I'm not a card collector...in fact these are the only cards I have, so I'm trying to educate myself a bit.

Thanks in advance for your assistance and apologies for any forum etiquette errors.

Cards I rec'd are:

Jim Harwell x3
Preston Gomez
Curt Roberts x2
Doug Camilli
Rod Graber x2
Mike Goliat

No etiquette errors, no worries! And welcome to the board.

Finding print runs for cards is really difficult, especially for sets like that which were very regional.
For a handful of big sets it's possible to back into a guesstimate based on a few announced profit/sales numbers, but that only gets to a very rough guess.
That being said, once in a while someone finds a company announcement saying they're distributing a certain number of cards.
Modern stuff - at least after they started being required to state the odds for inserts - it's possible to do some math and get a decent estimate.

How long have you been in printing? And what part of it are you in. I worked in a shop while in high school. While technically I was custodial staff, it was a small shop and we got a lot of opportunities to do a variety of tasks. So I ended up working a bit in every department except sales/estimating.

If you've been in a while, you might be able to back into a guess based on costs. What would have been a minimum order that would end up inexpensive enough for an advertising giveaway?
My guess is that a few hundred say 500-750 would have been far too expensive in the pre-computer days. But that for a local issue 10,000 of each would perhaps be too many.
How they were issued also matters, I'm guessing at how many Union Oil locations near Spokane, and how many customers a week, and say one different card each week, but I could be way off.

Thanks for the input Steve. I've been at it for about 30 years...took an interest about the time the mac came out, so everything was just converting to digital when I started. I held more than a few exacto knives doing paste-up during those conversions from film to digital. I'm the graphic design department here and jump in when the prepress department needs help. Our presses are all heidelbergs that occupy about 25K square feet each...way to sophisticated for me to even think about jumping in to help in that dept.

What got me thinking about these cards was the lack of images online I could find of this particular team/year. When I sat down to google them I figured I would find tons of hits, but boy was I wrong...that made me think they must've been pretty small print runs.

I actually stumbled onto the cards while shopping for some non-related items on shopgoodwill.com. Their age and sepia tint caught my eye so I picked them up for a song and was intrigued by them when they arrived. Love the bios on the backs of the cards....who knew that Jim Harwell was "an ardent pipe smoker and surely loves to brouse (typo on the card) around tobacco shops during his off time looking for new blends"!!

That's how it all starts. A certain image catches your eye, suddenly you pick up item for a great deal. Next thing you know you've got a room full of cool stuff and are hiding 1/2 the stuff you buy. It's a hell of a thing collecting, damn I love it.

BTW, the backs do have cool information on them.

That's really cool. A really interesting and different path into collecting if you go beyond this set.

The place I was at is a pretty small place that did a lot of small run fairly high quality work. The press I got to run for a week was a Heidelberg, but only a 35" single color sheetfeed one. The bit of time in the stripping dept. was helping fix the masks for a job where the camera guy had gotten tipsy at lunch "cleaned" the camera room stirring up a bunch of dust then decided to shoot the job. That was some big fun....

I have most of one of the other Union oil sets, and they're a lot nicer than online photos make them seem.