Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Yesterday I added virtual uncut sheets of 1971 Topps football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The sheets are not quite complete, but if you happen to have any badly miscut 1971 Topps cards in your collection, perhaps you can help fill in the holes. Click on the image below to see the sheets so far.

The Gallery now includes virtual uncut sheets, partial and whole, for 29 football card sets. For the full list, see one of my previous blog articles, U is for Uncut Sheets.

My friend John recently dug up an ad from an old auction catalog that shows two sections of a sheet of 1965 Topps football cards. This week I incorporated those sections into the 1965 Topps virtual uncut sheet page I had already started. You can check out the page to see my progress. If you happen to see more partial sheets or badly miscut cards that will help the effort, please send me an email.

Yesterday I added a virtual uncut panel of 1965 Topps football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. An 1965 Topps uncut panel recently appeared in an online auction, and I used that panel as a model. I have also assembled a few more bits and pieces of the full sheet by looking at badly miscut cards.

The Gallery now includes virtual uncut sheets, partial and whole, for 28 football card sets. For the full list, see one of my previous blog articles, U is for Uncut Sheets.

(Click on the image to see the full virtual sheet.)

This week I picked up another piece for my virtual uncut 1965, 1966, and 1967 Philadelphia uncut sheets: the miscut 1966 Philadelphia Steelers team card pictured here. There’s barely enough to tell, but the right side of the shows a little of John David Crow’s card. Here are the two cards together:

I have determined that 1965, 1966, and 1967 Philadelphia uncut sheets all had the same numbering pattern, so the miscut Steelers team card tells me that cards #144 and #175 were together on all three sheets. Those of you who are following my geeky project can see my progress on my Uncut Sheets in Progress page.

I also spotted another card this week that would help me, but it’s part of a large eBay lot, and I’m not quite crazy enough to spend $95 to get it. If you look carefully, you can see a miscut 1967 Brig Owens card in this group of miscellaneous vintage cards. I think the card to its left is John Brodie, but I’m not quite certain. Maybe I can get it if the auction ends without bids.

Yesterday, by looking at some miscut cards, I was able to add a few pieces to my virtual uncut sheet of 1955 Topps All-American football cards. One of the miscuts is pictured here: a Bob Odell card with a bit of Elmer Oliphant’s card showing along the bottom. As I find more of these, I hope to be able to piece together the whole 220-card sheet.

Check out my progress, and if you have any miscut cards that might help the effort, please send them my way.

A couple of weeks ago I bought this 8-card panel of 1966 Philadelphia football cards in an eBay auction. It provided another piece to the 1965-1967 Philadelphia virtual uncut sheets I have been working on. The project is a little (okay, a lot) geeky, but you can see my progress here.

As it says on my uncut sheet pages, I have concluded that card numbering scheme was the same on 1965, 1966, and 1967 Philadelphia sheets, so finding a piece of one helps with all three. (The 1964 Philadelphia sheet was numbered differently from the other three years, so I have to do that one independently.)

I have also mentioned before that there must be double prints in all four Phildelphia sets, because a full sheet held 264 cards, and there are only 198 cards in each set. That means 66 cards must have been printed twice on each sheet. I have not seen the double prints documented in any price guide, but I am reasonably sure that I know which 1965-1967 cards were double printed, so I have marked the them in the Gallery pages for those sets. Since the numbering scheme was the same on the 1965-1967 Philadelphia sheets, it follows that the same numbers were double prints in all three sets.

Yesterday, via an eBay purchase, I obtained another card that will help me figure out how 1962 Topps football cards were arranged on uncut sheets. The John Unitas card shown here has a sliver of Bill Forester’s card on the left. This bit of information let me add the Unitas to a piece of the uncut sheet I already had. To see where the new piece fit, scroll toward the bottom of the 1962 Topps virtual uncut sheet page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Another ten years, and I should have it finished!

For other virtual uncut sheets, some completed and some not, see a previous article, U is for Uncut Sheets.

Last week I invested $2 in a miscut Fran Rogel card I found on eBay. It provided another piece to the 1957 Topps virtual uncut sheet that I am slowly assembling. As you can see, you can’t tell from the front which card was under Rogel’s, but you can tell from the back that the card beneath is Royce Womble.

If you’re following along, you can see my progress on the sheet here.

This week I picked up two more miscut cards that will help me figure out how 1962 Topps football cards were arranged on the uncut sheets. The Boyd Dowler card shown here has a sliver of Roger LeClerc’s card on the right, and the Steve Myhra card has a bit of Joe Walton’s card on the right. Both of these clues let me add on to pieces of the puzzle I already had. You can see my progress on the 1962 Topps virtual uncut sheet page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Scroll toward the bottom to see where the new pieces fit.

Why are uncut sheets interesting? See a previous article, U is for Uncut Sheets.

You might recall that a couple of weeks ago I bought a lot of crudely hand-cut Baltimore Colts cards on eBay. Included in the lot was the 1961 Topps Raymond Berry card pictured below. The card to the left of the hacked-up Berry card appears to be Frank Ryan, so I was able to add a piece to my slowly growing 1961 Topps virtual uncut sheet. You can see my progress here.

For a full list of the virtual uncut sheets I have worked on, see the bottom of one of my previous blog articles, “U is for Uncut Sheets.”