Topps 67 Baseball w/ Discolored Backs

[BranchRickey56]

>I put this originally in the wrong Forum, so here it is addressed to the proper audience<

My favorite set has always been the 1967 Topps baseball set. Good photos, great design and it was the first set I started collecting when I became a baseball fan at age 11.

I decided recently to try to put a '67 set together but have been surprised by the number of single cards from this set out there that have discolored or "browned" backs.

Sometimes it will be a strip along one side that's yellowed as if the card had been exposed to light in that area. This seems to make sense if the cards were stored in a box and that little bit of the card had stuck out above the others. But sometimes the entire back will be yellow and washed out.

Other cards are really brown as if they had been exposed to a lot of cigarette smoke. I was thinking that maybe the early card storage sheets had leached chemicals onto the cards or "burned" the cardboard, causing that discoloration. But I don't remember seeing anything like this from when I got out stored my originals in the late 1980s. (My original cards were stolen by the movers during a company paid-for move to Atlanta in 2000- don't ask, it's still a sore point.)

I've bought from both average joe's and reputable dealers on eBay and despite being listed as "NM" or "EX" some still arrive with these color problems.

Anyone have any ideas on this? Are many of the cards from that year like this? My almost complete 1965 Topps baseball set doesn't have any of these kinds of issues and I've been putting it together in the same way. Have I just been unlucky?

Sorry, I can't post scans as I'm having issues with my printer/scanner contraption.

Really just confused and hoping someone can shed some light on this...

[ALR-bishop]

Greg---I have a 1967 set ( it is one of my favorites) and some dupes and after checking, do not notice what you are describing in my cards.

I do have a couple of 1967s with all green backs

[ALR-bishop]

...and 1967 Topps fronts can be weird too

[BranchRickey56]

Wow! Love those all-green ones! I wonder how they get printed like that?!?


Here's some examples of what I was talking about:

Top.BMP.jpg

The O's Team Card is the "normal" one as far as color goes.

Compare that to the Bauer card, which has very noticeable brown coloring in the white areas.

The Pepitone card has the yellowing on the right side I was talking about.

Finally, the Fergie Jenkins card is all washed out and very yellow.

These colors are not from printing. When you see the card in person, it's obvious that there's fading or alteration of what was originally printed there.

So, what's causing this? And on so many of the cards I have? I'm perplexed!

[steve B]

I'd posted a brief thought about it on the original thread.

I think it's a combination of things.
If the cards were stored in a regular cardboard box that degraded the acid from that would affect the cards that were touching it.

I also think there are some interesting things about late 60's Topps cards as far as the cardboard goes. Some have the natural cardboard while others have a layer of white printed before the back. I'm also fairly sure some like 67 are a layered stock with the fronts glued onto a basic cardboard.
And that some of the cardboard used was better quality once in a while.

All those things could lead to effects like the ones shown. Especially the breakdown of the cardboard box.
Even the white ones currently sold. Some of my older ones are getting quite browned from age.

Plastic sleeves will help prevent it.


I love the all green backs! There's a few thigs that could do that.
1) Plate without the blank areas.
2) Running the press dry. The printing relies on a damp plate that the oily onk won't stick to, and if the water is allowed to run out the plate picks up solid color.
3) Similar to 2, but a loose bit of paper that gets stuck to the plate will pick up and transfer solid color too. But it's usually not a good solid print.

So my vote would be #2.

Steve B

[ALR-bishop]

Good post as usual, Steve

[BranchRickey56]

Good Ideas and thoughts, Steve.

Your suggestion that the fading could be caused by acidic reaction from the boxes the cards were stored in makes sense, but only if the faded cards were touching the box cardboard. There seem to be way too many cards affected for that to be the main cause; perhaps 20% of my set of (so far) 544 shows some sort of color problem.

Steve, could discoloration be caused by touching other cards in storage, rather than touching the box? In other words, could you see an acidic reaction/discoloration caused by another card touching a given card, or by cards touching each other?

Also, I have over 500 cards from the 1965 BB set, almost none of which show this amount of browning. Does anyone have cards with this discoloration from the '68 or '69 sets? (As I mentioned, my cards from those sets were "borrowed" by the movers, so I don't have examples for comparison.)

I don't know anything about cardboard and how it's made, so your idea that Topps used different kinds of cardboard in different years is intriguing. Is there evidence that they may have done this or do you just think they might have based on what you've seen?

Again, thanks for the feedback and great ideas!

[BranchRickey56]

And by the way, Al, I'm especially fond of the "Alvin-Dark-as-Little-Orphan-Annie" card you showed from the "Who AM I?" set.

If you know anything about his personality, it makes it esp. funny!

[ALR-bishop]

Greg---I mentioned that I don't notice this issue with my 67 backs, but all of my set, and all the dupes, are and have been separated in sheets in binders.

I have the baseball subset of the regularly issued Who Am I issue, both scratched and unscratched. So when Topps Vault offered this proof sheet involving regular 67 cards with disguises, I really wanted it

[Exhibitman]

The all-greens are probably wrong stock. Topps didn't print the white areas, they printed the green and the black over the white areas. Here are examples of other Topps flubs with only the back card color printed:



As for weird 1967s:

[steve B]

I have non-card stuff that has rectangles of brown on it from being in contact with some acidic paper for a long time. But it's not purely from the contact, it takes contact plus one bit of paper breaking down.

Put a newspaper clipping in a nice white envelope for a few years. If you can accelerate the breakdown by putting it on a sunny windowsill so much the better. Eventually the clipping will leave a brown stain.

Cardboard is basically wood pulp with some other stuff added. Grind up some sawdust in water and that's basically paper pulp. Pour it onto a screen press it flat and let it dry and you've got paper/cardboard. Wood contains lots of cellulose stuck together with lignin which breaks down over time.
http://www.ehow.com/list_6591100_cha...cardboard.html

Various grades of cardboard are bleached, or may include stuff other than wood pulp. Depending on how it's made it can be more or less acidic over time. The cheap stuff like brown cardboard boxes will get pretty acidic and brittle. Better stuff will be usually be whiter and take longer to much longer to breakdown. Unless the bleaching chemicals make it worse. (60's Topps are average ish, 20's strip cards are on pretty bad stock and I doubt they'll be collectable in 200 years, T206s are nearly acid free and should be with us for a very long time.

I checked a few 67s and they're not multi layer- at least the first series.
I also don't have any with a lot of fading. But I do have some with cardboard that's been treated differently.

69's are the most obvious for the different treatments of the cardboard, and some show more breakdown than others. Here's a pair, one with degraded stock that's been left raw, the other has had a layer of white printed before any of the pink or black


Another thing that could cause the fading is if they're from dealer inventories that got long exposure to light, like a flea market dealer or something like that.

Another thing that came to mind would be the reaction of the ink itself. The green may be more fadeable by the breakdown products than the yellow or pink.

Telling if it's different cardboard or just different storageis a complex thing that I just know some of the basics of, largely from other hobbies. (Stamps, old books, film*, other ephemera) I could probably figure out a lot more, but I'm not really equipped for that level of hard science and my chemistry has gotten a bit rusty since Highschool.

Steve B

*Lots of film is Cellulose acetate which breaks down giving off acetic acid - Vinegar- which can accelerate the breakdown if it's in a sealed can. The old film on Cellulose Nitrate gives off Nitric acid and when it catches fire self oxidizes making it darn hard to put out.

[ALR-bishop]

Adam--I have several 71s like those, with 3 blank white boxes

[BranchRickey56]

Excellent ideas from everyone.

I had my '67's until 2000 (when they were stolen); they had been stored in shoe boxes in a regular closet with my other cards until about 1988 (and hadn't been handled since about 1973). I got them out again in 1995, when I started to collect again.

From the time I took them out of the packs back in the day to the last time I saw them just before moving to Atlanta in 2000, they always looked the same: perfectly white and green with only the odd imperfections that they had been printed with by Topps.

That's why all this is such a mystery to me. None of my originals seemed to be bothered by these color problems and none of the other card issues from that era have any of the same looks.

I think it may be that I've just had bad luck in buying and trading for cards that have "soured" or "spoiled"!!!

[SMPEP]

Thought I would chime in on this variation debate. I found this Dick Kelly card.

It is low grade, but in person it definitely does not look faded. It looks like the back was originally yellow, not green.

Cheers,
Patrick

[BranchRickey56]

Another conundrum added to the mystery! Thanks Patrick.

I still don't know what caused all these kinds of fading/miscolored cards in this set. As I said when this thread was originally posted, with the cards I have these kinds of miscoloration only show up in the 1967 set.

Any new ideas? Anyone?