1976 Hostess
Jay,
I believe you will find other brown backs and they will be closely correlated to another Hostess set. We had earlier raised this question regarding 1975 Hostess Twinkies. As you may or may not be aware there was a significant amount of discussion which followed the original post.
Eventually, I ran into one of the original dealers that purchased a significant number of test sheets from one of the workers at the original printer. Although my original objective was to determine if corrected Hostess "Black Bar" Twinkies cards existed (they don't - they occur only in non-Black Bar "regular" Hostess cards; Twinkie rarity is perhaps 20:1 over Hostess) I gained a lot of understanding about the creation and subsequent printing of the set.
The original 1975 Hostess set had a number of production issues - from misspellings, food stains, poor photo selection (ITT parent company was allowed to use Topps "2nd" rejected photographs not used in their 1975 set) to differences in ink. Late in the 1975 production year, they were noted as experimenting with the layout & design of the 1976 set. A number of scraps for 1976 set existed in brown backs and other colors.
The dealer indicated he had numerous scraps from this era and that the printer used brown and other colors of ink in place of black as a test. I suspect the population for "other colors" will be in the single digits and probably came from the same scrap sheets. 1976 Brown backs will probably have a correlation to which cards cross over to other sets - as in the 1975 Hostess Twinkies.....but this is just a guess.
Good luck.
Z
|