The 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread inserts and Cards and Photos from the era with like and similar pictures.
Part One - Introduction
Since Ted Zanidakis made the original post in the net54baseball.com thread entitled “1947 BOND BREAD and its "imposters"....show us your cards ?” over ten years ago on April 4, 2009, it has highly discussed the 48 card 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert card set and many other cards and team photos with similar or identical pictures, or which are otherwise related. The thread contains pictures of some of these other cards. Many of these sets contain potential first year cards (rookie cards) of the player pictured. After the era these sets were issued, 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert cards and most of the related cards and photos have been lost and are no longer common. Since its inception over a decade ago, the thread has had participation from all over the collecting universe. Even those actively engaged in buying and selling cards have asked questions or otherwise participated. Attribution is important because today. All of the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert cards have a much higher order of magnitude in volue than the original cost of the loaf of bread each came in. So do the “impostor” sets.
Net54baseball.com has other threads that have addressed the Homogenized Bond Bread set of Jackie Robinson cards. One such thread has provided not only pictures of the known cards in the set, but authentic documentation to conclusive establish that what was once was thought to been a set of all Jackie Robinson rookie cards was actually a set of cards issued one card at a time by Homogenized Bond Bread from 1947 through 1949. The first card was issued during the summer of 1947 with the other cards issued at separate times during those three years. Though the cards from 1948 and 1949 are not Robinson rookie cards, they remain quite rare.
By the late 1980s-early 1990s, hunting for rookie cards had become a national passtime, perhaps in the minds of many supplanting baseball itself. You could buy a pack of cards from most any card set issued in the 1980s, grade any rookie card found inside, and if you received a high enough grade the rookie card could be worth $20, $50, $100 or more. Collectors did not consider that the number of card manufacturers had increased 50 fold from the early 1980s to 1990, with the quantities of actual cards printed increasing many times more. Card manufacturers were loading up their new sets with more and more cards of the most unproven rookies to the exclusion of well established players. People were paying big money for rookie cards. Many were promoting putting such graded rookie cards away as investments for various retirement accounts. It rarely mattered if a new rookie card was printed as a “limited” edition of 100 or was a regular issue printed that had been printed in quantities of up to 500,000 or more. Grading suddenly made it valuable. Buyers failed to recognized that the value of graded rookie cards issued in the 1980s of popular players was not based on the number of cards actually graded, but based on the sentiment they had for the player.
By the 1990s, the tremendous increase in the volume of cards made by the ever increasing pool of card manufacturers, put into the market place more cards than could be sold. Retailers like Walgrens and Kresge's had volumes of boxes of cards left over unsold at the end of baseball seasons. Wholesalers like Costo and Price Club did not sell out. People who wanted to cash out of their valuable 1980s graded rookie cards found too many others trying to do the same thing. Hobby dealers buying direct from the manufacturer found on delivery of their orders that others were already discounting the product by up to 50% of what they had paid (sometimes 6 months in advance) to the manufacturer. The price of graded new rookie cards collapsed. The card market crashed.
In 2000, I asked SCG to grade four cards from the Festberg find. The grading label on the first three cards (Ted Williams, Joe Louis and Stan Musial) identify the cards as “1947 Homogenized Bond” cards. The fourth (Jackie Robinson) was returned to me with an indication the size of the card was too narrow. Scans are provided. The Robinson card was a little narrower than the other 3 cards SCG had graded. In fact, the Robinson card was the narrowest of all cards in that 24 card set. All of the cards in that 24 card set had slight variations in dimensions from each other. Duplicate cards of the same player from the Festberg find also vary slightly in dimensions from each other. Those variation in height and width among the cards of the Festberg find helps explain why the cards are toned and less thick than the normal cards in the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert set and the “Sports Star Subjects” set. What these differences mean will be discussed in the posts of the next parts of my discussion.
Among the good things that came from the increase in activity in cards in the 1980s is first, many new collectors entered the hobby. While much of that increasing card activity may have been generated by the profit cards could generate, the increased public awareness led to searches for and the findings of many old and forgotten cards across the country. Supply and demand is a better determinant of the scarcity of vintage cards and than sentiment. Sentiment, though, is still an important factor. You can ask most anyone whether they would like to have a 1952 Topps “rookie” card of Mickey Mantle or one of Sal Yvars. Virtually all would say, “Mickey Mantle.” With the follow-up question, “Do you know who Sal Yvars is?,” the response is invariably, “Who's he?” Try asking the average Joe whether he would want a tobacco card of Ruth or Wagner.
Sentiment was an important factor in the issuance of the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread inserts. The parent company of Homogenized Bond Bread and Tip Top Bread capitalized on the sentiment of aficionados of baseball to attract them to select those bread brands over other ones. The ultimate customer only sees the tip of the iceberg. Most have more knowledge about the bread than about what it took in research, planning, development, printing and insertion of the cards into the bread packages. The source of the pictures used on the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert cards, the reasons why those pictures are the same as pictures in Team Photo Packs and on cards that did not come as inserts in bread packages, the printing of these items, the dating of these sets and more will appear in my posts of the next parts of this discussion. Thank you for reading.
Copyright 2020, by Michael Fried, P.O. Box 27521, Oakland, California 94602-0521