I'll tell you where I'm coming from.
I start off being highly suspicious of this card's origins solely due to the
George Bush Sr. card. Those came from the same geographical location
as the NNOF allegedly did. Off the bat, I'm skeptical. No serious trail of
boxes/cases has ever been sniffed out. How has nobody has ever traced
back to a solid source when they pulled this from a pack in the early 90s?
Nobody went back for more
all after they pulled the first one?
NY was a common place for Topps to do tests for years. That something odd would have been released there or would have snuck out there is no surprise. Heck, I lived in western Mass, in a place probably served by a wholesaler out of NY and got a pack of 75 Minis at one point.
Something of this magnitude would have been sniffed out given the attention
it got. It seems far too coincidental that a big find has never been unearthed.
If 100 Bush cards can walk out the back door, a similar number printer's
scrap sheets with Thomas's name missing could do the same.
Ah, but whenever something like that has happened, and it happened a lot in the late 80s- early 90's, the cards turned up in quantity, often in uncut sheets. Not one here one there like this card. The one I've seen in person was in the late 90's and came from a source in the Boston area. Now whether that source got it out of someone in NY I don't know. At the time I felt it was a printing error rather than a variation.
Now I could be completely wrong, and it's likely these cards were just a fluke
staccato in the printing timeline. I suspect these were at least partially
supplemented by a group of cards exiting the factory not via packs.
I'm not sure exactly what that means. It was a major print defect that affected one black plate used to print the cards, and it affected several other cards on the same sheet. Could some have left the factory not in packs? Of course they could have, but as above that stuff usually showed up in quantity , and these didn't
At the time I was buying cards from multiple sources, both hobby and retail, and in different pack formats. I've been interested in misprints since the 70's, and did get the occasional misprinted card. It would have never occurred to me to keep track of what sort of pack it came from, let alone what store I got that pack from. And it's general appearance is not something that looks like a plate problem. It looks more like a piece of paper or a peeled section of sheet got between the sheet and the inked part of the press. We know better now. AT the time if I'd found one I'd have stuck it in a toploader labeled as "obstructed print" and filed it with the rest of the transient printing mistakes. I would assume that it was not the error described in Beckett.
When I do make an organic find, I'll fully retract my skepticism. I live in New
York 5 minutes from the Bush Sr. find. I see way more packs, boxes, cases
than your average bear out here. If these were pack delivered, they will be
pack found...by me
Happy Collecting!