1952 Topps Baseball - Perspectives

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Zach Wheat

Steve,

Do you have any insight into whether a job like pre-production salesmen's samples would be shopped out to a smaller printer or whether Topps would print these in-house? The reason I ask is that the '52 Topps salesmen samples appear to be printed on the same gray paper stock and appear to have the most common type of fronts as most gray backs (dull grayish/brown hue).

I have always thought that contracting out a portion of the printing to another source, due to higher than anticipated demand was the reason for the different paper types.

It's possible. We can be fairly sure they did it a decade later because of the green tints, But by then they probably farmed out a portion of the production.
Some random pros/cons

If it wasn't so early, I'd think it was. But promotional stuff should have been done early to generate pre sales for series 1. So promos should be pre-demand. And doing them on cheaper stock makes some financial sense. Not much need to farm them out.

If I recall it right, the 51s come on two different stocks. That would be from two different runs, which seems backed up by the variations in the redbacks.
Different places? Or just different times?

I'm not sure what proofing Topps did early, but they were doing all sorts of proofing by the mid 60's. If their capacity was essentially the same, they would have had plenty of time to do promo stuff alongside the other sets and products they were printing for.