[HolyGrail]

Your info is really helpful. Am trying to determine when the cachet began. I believe it was about the time he was inducted into the HOF in '74.

As you know, in the mid-late 60s catalogs which you've posted on Net54, the '52 Mantle was listed as a high-series common.

You wrote: “Maybe he thought that since they were already selling for a premium, it wasn't fair to charge a double premium; or maybe he didn't have 52 Topps high numbers in stock consistently enough to worry about pricing individual cards.”

I'm also wondering if this was partly due to Mantle's faded glory on lousy teams in the late 1960s. There were bigger stars. And other cards like the Wagner, Plank, and Lajoie seemed to have cachet from the start.

As someone said of the "52 Mantle in their response, "the power of marketing."