In the process of moving into my family's new house, I have been taking things, especially things related to my baseball card collection, from my mom's house. I previously took all the baseball cards, but today I went back to Mom's to get my old price guides and baseball card magazines:
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My old price guides, which are mainly Baseball Cards magazine. |
In this post, though, I wanted to mainly talk about the 1988 Topps UK Set.
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Box for the 1988 Topps UK Set. |
This is a set of what we would call miniature cards, and there were 88 of them in the whole set. You can find unopened packs for sale on ebay; I only ever saw the complete sets for sale, though, and that's what I bought. Here are a few samples, Harold Baines, Wally Joyner, and Juan Samuel.
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Three of the 1988 Topps UK cards. |
I think it's unusual that the cards appear in alphabetical order, from #1 Harold Baines to #87 Robin Yount, with #88 being the checklist. Here are the card backs, with only a couple lines of statistics, a little cartoon and fact about the player, a faux signature and some vital statistics, and then a description of baseball rules and statistics, for the UK audience, in the category "Talkin' Baseball."
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The card backs. |
I always thought this was a handsome set, and I kind of wished they would make a whole US-sized set (size meaning both not minis, and 700+ cards) in this design. I could lose the "Talkin' Baseball" feature, but otherwise I think the design would go great for a full set.
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The top of the complete set box, with American flag. |
I'm including a couple more pictures of the box, namely the top and the bottom. The top is mostly a picture of the American flag, to help make clear where they play American baseball. The bottom of the box indicates that the cards were manufactured in Ireland by Topps Ireland. I would be interested to find out more about Topps Ireland, since I've noticed that this isn't the only set I have which was made in Ireland.
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Bottom of the complete set box, indicating it was made by Topps Ireland. |
I started out this post by mentioning that I have just reclaimed my old magazines and price guides, and so I'll close by drawing the connection to the 1988 Topps UK set. Baseball Cards magazine was partially a price guide, but was largely an advertising vehicle for many baseball card dealers. One dealer, Texas Sportcard Company, frequently placed a multi-page ad; here's just one page:
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Page 4 of 5 of the Texas Sportcard Company ad in the July 1991 issue of Baseball Cards magazine. |
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I'm sure it's hard to spot, but among all the sets advertised there is the 1988 Topps UK set. It's marked "SCARCE!!" and was on offer for $14.95. Here's a close-up:
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Close-up of the above ad, showing the 1988 Topps UK set. |
I'm sure that I bought the set from an ad in one of the magazines, but I certainly don't remember which dealer I got it from. I do remember being surprised when I started seeing a UK set in the ads, and ordered it fairly soon afterwards. Looking at these ads (and there are many, many ads per issue) I see so many offbeat sets, and part of me wants to find them now and buy them. But then part of me thinks, what's the point of buying the 1987 M&M's set, and the 1978 Tastee-Freez discs set, and the 1988 Bazooka set, anymore?
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