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Vintage Phillies Team Sets

Sunday, June 23, 2013

The 1st Phillies Team Set Gallery Week

As a young(er) baseball card collector, my favorite baseball card book was Topps Baseball Cards: The Complete Picture Collection.  If you're familiar with this book, you know that it's massive, it's heavy and it contains pictures of every Topps flagship baseball card released from 1951 through 1985.  I think later additions added a few years, but my edition only goes up through 1985.

I loved this book.  The day I received it as a gift from my parents was a very happy day, and I spent days looking through pictures of the old Topps cards and getting familiar with the card designs of the 1950s and 1960s.  I remember wishing that books were available like this for all baseball cards, especially the releases from the early 1980s from Donruss and Fleer and non-Topps issues from the 1900s onwards.  I'd daydream about walking into the book store in the Cumberland Mall and finding the "Complete Donruss Collection," or even the "Complete Kellogg's-Post-Hostess Collection."

1974 Topps Stamps
Sadly, these books never materialized.  There's something aesthetically pleasing about seeing groups of similar baseball cards together, so as I embark on a week's vacation to the Happiest Place on Earth, I've decided to use my blog to start what has long been missing from our world.

Starting tomorrow, and throughout the week, I'll be featuring all the Phillies cards from a selection of team sets that I've collected.  The team sets I feature will be of the oddball variety, so if you've ever had the burning desire to see all the 1974 Topps Phillies Stamps together in gallery form - this is your lucky week.  If this goes well, and if it's not too much of a pain to scan cards in, I'll take requests for the next "Gallery Week" when I depart for vacation again in August.

Please sit back and enjoy and I'll be back live next week.  (There will be a few semi-live series preview posts throughout the week.  And I'll tell Mickey you said hello.)

8 comments:

  1. Hey! I've got that book too. I remember going through it with my Dad in the mid-80s. I had to be 7 or 8 at the oldest.

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  2. I've wanted this book since the first day I saw it in an old book store where my grandmother lived.

    That was over 30 years ago.

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  3. I got this book for Christmas, along with the 1986 update. The update has the 1985 Traded set and 1986 set in it. 9 cards to a page so they're much bigger pictures. I saw the 1987 update at one point (didn't get it), but I don't know if any more ever came out.

    I too spent hours looking at old cards. Hours upon hours.....

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  4. I never got to get this book and I'm always looking for it so I can use it a reference as I try to build my Yankees Topps Collection.

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  5. Great book, and I am enjoying your robotic posts.

    Don't bother reporting on what the Phillies have done this week. Seriously. No need, unfortunately. (And I write this only after they have lost game 1 of the road trip. I suspect there will be a lot more to follow.)

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  6. I wonder if Topps has any intention of eventually publishing an updated book through 2013?

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  7. Alas, the current Topps team probably isn't even aware of the existence of the book.

    It's a great book, and I suppose that is the reason why my binding has torn--because it is a heavy book and I seem to consult it a fair amount. I believe Topps later did a 1989 version that added four years of cards to it.

    They also put out 1950s and 1960s versions of the book for those on a budget (or not caring about the 1970s and 1980s). The 1950s book, unlike the big one, also contains the Bowman cards from that decade, so if you want to see those cards, it is a good investment to add that. I don;t think the 1960s set adds anything.

    It would be nice if Topps did an update and included all of their oddball cards as well.

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  8. For some reason, I think I remember there was a tobacco card version of this book?

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