Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

While putting some 1957 Topps cards up for sale yesterday, I noticed some details that I hadn’t before. First, I noticed that, on every card, the background color behind the player’s name is the same as the background color on the right half of the card. This ties the two halves of the card together.

Second, I noticed that the player’s name is white on first series Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns, and Detroit Lions cards, but it is black on those teams’ second series cards. (Mike McCormack’s card is the only exception: it is a first series card, but his name is in black.) Apparently, Topps decided between series that black names looked better, so they changed the white names to black. Or, perhaps, when designing the first series cards, they thought that white names looked better for these teams, but when they got to the second series, they forgot and left them black.

When I started this article, I intended just to point out these trivia, but then I realized that someone actually sat down and made decisions about these details. Though the cards were meant for kids, an artist took the time to match the background colors and tweak the font colors to make the cards look their best. You have to appreciate that. (My initial title for this article was “Dumb Stuff I Noticed,” poking fun to my own card-geekiness, but I decided that that was insulting to whoever designed the cards.)

Finally, you have probably noticed that, in the 1957 Topps set, the cards for each team all have the same background colors. I have always liked this feature, and most of the major companies used it for at least one set. (Other examples are 1955 Bowman, 1962 Fleer, and 1967 Philadelphia.) If you look at the Lions team set, you can see that this coloring scheme highlights an error: the 49ers traded John Henry Johnson to the Lions in 1957, but Topps listed Johnson as a Brown. Topps even recolored Johnson’s uniform to put him in Browns colors. You can see this recoloring in a previous article.

A couple of months ago I wrote about the white footballs you sometimes see on old Bowman cards. Naturally, after writing that post, I started noticing more and more white footballs. Here are a few that I came across while adding 1950’s cards to my sales site the last couple of days: 1953 Bowman Emlen Tunnell, 1954 Bowman Emlen Tunnell (apparently from the same photo session as 1953), 1955 Bowman Tom Fears, 1956 Topps Adrian Burk, and 1957 Lenny Moore.

The 1954 Tunnell card is the corrected version, with two L’s in his last name. The second L looks as if it’s been penciled in: it’s a bit fainter and wider than the first L, and the spacing isn’t quite right. I don’t know anything about printing, but it looks like someone improvised to fix the spelling error.

It appears that Adrian Burk was another jumping quarterback, or at least he’s up on his tip-toes.