No room for Jello

I was intrigued by garveyceyrusselllopes' post this morning on early 1960s Jello cards because like many collectors I've never been able to tell the difference between Jello cards and the Post cards that came out at the same time.

Oh, sure, there are lots of places you can go where they'll tell you how to figure out the difference, but that means actually having to reeeeaadd something that isn't a card blog and I'm so laaaaaaaaazy.

So even though I have the information right in the next room in the form of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, I just kept right on going, "maybe I have a Post card, maybe I have a Jello card, oh, well, I guess I'll never know, la di dah!"

I'm glad someone finally put a stop to that. Jim's blog post referenced Wrigley Wax's blog post from a couple of months ago that had information on how to tell the difference.

This basically concerns only the 1963 Post and Jello cards because with the 1962 Post and Jello cards you can figure it out quite easily.

The Post cards have a logo on it that says ... um ... Post. Pretty hard to mix 'em up.

By the way, this Stan Williams card was sent to me by Commish Bob, of The Five Tool Collector, recently. I sure do appreciate it.

But in 1963, Post dropped its logo, who knows why, and '63 Post and Jello cards look essentially the same. So I went right to the few 1963 Post/Jello cards that I have to determine with this new-found information whether I have a Post or Jello card.

OK, two of the differences between '63 Post and '63 Jello are too difficult to determine without having one of each kind to compare side-by-side. Those two differences are that the Jello cards are not as wide as the Post cards, and the Jello cards feature smaller name fonts than the Post cards.

But the key tell-tale sign is that on Post cards, the red line that separates a player's 1962 stats from his Life stats extends far beyond the first figure on the left and the last figure on the right. On the Jello cards, the red line extends just past the numbers, but only a character or so.

So, looking at the Drysdale card, I can definitely say that it's a Post card.

Oh well, moving on.

Here is Drysdale's batterymate, John Roseboro. Look at that red line practically travel off the cardboard. Yep, that's a Post card, too.

0-for-2.

Final try. Here is the star of the 1962 season, Maury Wills (yet there is no column for stolen bases). The red line is taking a large lead off a first base there, which leads me to believe that this is also a Post card.

0-for-3.

And there's no room for Jello in my collection.

Rats.

Someday I'll seek out some of those Jello cards, especially since I know what to look for now. After actually opening my Standard Catalog to the 1963 Jello section and actually reading it, it's interesting to note that some of the cards are scarce because they were printed on the back of less popular brands and sizes of Jello.

This fascinates me. What were the less popular brands? I'm saying one is tapioca. Tapioca is one of those foods that seemed to be popular only before I was born. I don't even know what it is. So I'm saying -- without doing a stitch of research -- that those rare cards were on the back of tapioca boxes.

But if anyone wants to enlighten me, I'll be all ears. I love that kind of information.

Commish Bob also sent me another Post card:

There's no mistaking that's a 1961 Post. There were no Jello cards in 1961.

One more card from the Commish:

Awesome. A real live rookie 1959 Topps Ron Fairly from the proprietor of the '59 Topps blog.

And best of all, I don't have to do any work to figure out exactly what it is.

Oh, right, green backs and black backs.

Sorry, my researching is done for the day.