Night Owl Cards

  In order to keep this series in my head and not forget about it for a year, I'm running another version of "Joy of a Subset" three months later, which is a little sooner than I'd like as I usually space them out more.  Tonight I'm going way back, to what you could argue was the first "out-of-the-box" topic for a subset in Topps history.   Subsets were a new idea for Topps in the '50s. If you define subsets by how I knew them in the 1970s, they are at least three consecutively numbered cards, all sharing the same theme. Topps' first experience with that approach is in 1958 with the 21-card Sport Magazine All-Stars that come at the end of the set.   The All-Stars return in 1959, but using The Sporting News as the sponsor. The Sporting News appears again in the set with a string of 31 "Rookie Stars of 1959" all featuring the same red, white and blue background.    But as evidence that Topps embraced the subset idea completely, there was ...

  Here we are, three days into the new year and I've forgotten again the series that I last posted three days into last year.   Maybe this series wasn't meant to be. I've forgotten it twice now and it's been so buried in my subconscious that when I'm desperately searching for "which blog series can I update that I didn't just do?" it never occurred to me to do the one I haven't done for a year!   But I guess that's what early January is for, taking stock of past blog posts.   For those who don't remember (like me), the Joy of a Subset series is my attempt to review the traditional subsets of my youth, mostly from Topps, which put together all kinds of subsets in the '70s and '80s, stuff like record breakers and highlights and league leaders, etc.   I've already reviewed the 1975 Highlights set and the 1976 league leaders set . Today I'm staying with 1976 and looking at a set that I should have reviewed in my second Joy of a...

  I kicked off what I thought might be a regular series last February with "Joy of a subset," hoping to regularly recognize a forgotten yearly component of Topps sets. I kind of forgot about it, as I often do, until reviewing my posts for the previous year. I'm always looking for post content so, let's revive this thing right away! This time I'm featuring a league leaders subset that is one of my favorites and rather unique in its own way, although the practice was actually started during the 1960s when I wasn't collecting. Is this the first time Topps used pyramid-style league leaders cards, in 1964? I don't have the time to do a full-scale investigation. Immediately prior to '64, Topps was preoccupied with floating heads leader cards. Pyramid leader cards continued through some '60s sets and into the 1970s with 1970 and 1971 and one example in 1973. Then Topps waited until 1976 to spring this on me: I was devoted instantly. I loved these. In loo...

  Is this a new series? I think it might be. I was attempting to hunt down a new angle for the "Joy of a Team Set" series a week or two ago, but I'm starting to feel like I've run out of ideas for that series. I'm not going to end it, I may have just hit a temporary snag, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction. I've praised the common, ordinary subset many times on this blog and have devoted a full post to individual ones here and there. I've even written a magazine article focused on them. Subsets seem like a fad of the past, with inserts taking over in the mid-to-late '90s. But the subset still appears periodically. However, I don't count a group of cards as subsets if they are not numbered consecutively in a set. That's the first rule of defining a subset. (Topps, start grouping your league leader cards together again, please). Subsets have been part of main sets since the 1950s, probably longer. During the '50s and ...