Dave, thanks for the info!
I have some other questions looming here, but for the moment let me engage in some speculation…
For one thing, it seems there are quite a few green tints that are DP's. Whenever you do searches, they just appear way more frequently than the other GT's. Way more frequently. And I have many more of these cards in my personal collection than the other guys. The ones that come to mind are the cards with the crazy lime green backgrounds:
#117 Gary Geiger, #122 Norm Bass, #123 Mike De La Hoz, #145 Barry Latman, #162 Sammy Drake, #171 Dave Sisler, #178 Camilo Carreon, #187 Gene Conley and #191 Jim Brewer.
All have lime green backgrounds and are readily available anywhere you look. To me, there is no way they were printed in the same quantities as the other cards.
Some others have this same phenomenon but are a bit tougher to find, namely #114 Howie Koplitz, #155 Stu Miller and #194 Dean Chance. #139 Babe Hits 60, #139 Hal Reniff (pitching pose) and #140 Gehrig & Ruth also stand out as overly greened cards. Since all of these cards share the same extreme printing problems, I'm under the impression that they were perhaps printed all together in a different sheet setup than the 'normal' green tint cards. You could also include one or two of the pose variation cards, as they are overly greened, but to a lesser extent than the cards already mentioned.
The story goes that Topps contracted with a printer upstate to increase the amount of cards they were printing that year. I haven't seen anything verifiable that points to a specific printer, but some theorize it was a company that produced some 1952 cards for Topps. Again, that's not confirmed. But since whoever did the job had obvious problems with the printing plates, etc., and new layouts were created with each and every photograph being cropped differently, it is certainly not beyond reason to speculate that they didn't follow the usual guidelines for printing Topps cards. Whoever produced these cards did an awful job. There's no disputing that fact. It seems to me that they probably cobbled the entire run together, creating a variety of SP's and DP's in the process. Personally, I think it is very fair to reason that the printer's work in no way conformed to the usual Topps practices with regard to the standard 88/264 card sheet paradigm. Perhaps that's why (I imagine) they were never used by Topps again. Unfortunately, since no one can find an uncut sheet, we may never know.
Now for a question…
If you look at the first 1962 checklist, it includes 88 cards. Since the GT's run from #110 to #196, it is very confusing. Shouldn't the green tints begin at #89 and only go up to #176? In other words, the entire second series? Why is it that the GT's straddle both the second and third series?? Didn't Topps print one full series at a time??
|