Who spilled blue ink all over my 1976 high numbers?

[Cliff Bowman]

Back in the good old days of eBay when they used to let you know who all of the other bidders are and let you talk to each other, I got to know a fellow print error collector who told me that when he mail ordered a 1976 Topps baseball set back in 1976 the set he received had around 200 of the cards with a flaw of varying degrees of blue dots on them. At first he was dissatisfied with them and thought about returning the cards, but over the years he was glad he didn't because he got into printing error cards. He showed me several scans of his and I was hooked immediately. The problem was, at that time years ago I could hardly find any of them and got frustrated and gave up. A couple of years ago a seller on eBay had a bunch of them so I got back into looking for them and they started popping up everywhere. All of them are from the last two sheets of the set from 1976, they are all cards #400 and up except for the Record Breaker cards and the team cards which Topps decided to put on the high number sheets. The ones shown are the most afflicted cards, most of them have only a few stray blue dots. There should be cards of J. R. Richard and Joe Decker with heavy blue dots but I haven't been able to find them. Not all cards on the two sheets have blue dots.

[Rich Klein]

Roland Chapdelaine wrote an article back in the day about his adventures in trying to become a full time dealer and talks about how many dealers with vend cases got buried when these unusable cards appeared in their vend boxes in 1976. It was a hilarious read at the time

Rich

[steve B]

That's some serious ink spatter.

[ALR-bishop]

I have decided there is a devious side to Cliff. He uncovers these related recurring print anomalies, documents them, and for good measure will send you a few examples clearly intended to suck you into the hunt for the rest...however many there may be.

All seriousness aside, Cliff has been great at running down recurring related print defects, sharing his knowledge of them and then helping folks who are interested frun them down....well he has been a big help to me anyway

[steve B]

The more I look at these, the more I think it's not ink spatter. If it was and was as bad as it looks, it should extend into and across the borders.
But it doesn't.

[Cliff Bowman]

Originally Posted by steve B

The more I look at these, the more I think it's not ink spatter. If it was and was as bad as it looks, it should extend into and across the borders.
But it doesn't.

You are right, other than the Hank Aaron RB where there a few areas of blue ink splatter in his name inside the blue box, every card with the blue dots is only affected in the photo, it never gets into the white border or the colored border area around the photo. Apparently the photos were the first phase of the process of constructing the sheets and were placed on the sheet after being splattered with the blue ink, and then the colored borders, outer white borders, player names, player positions, and team names were put on the sheet later in the sheet creation process. This flaw is recurring, and there are several more cards from the two sheets with blue ink dots, these are just the worst examples with the flaw. ETA, the two sheets with the flaw were originally printed together as one huge 264 card sheet before they were cut in half to make two 132 card sheets.