That looks familiar

 

The latest edition of Beckett Vintage magazine showed up on the porch Monday. It contains my most recent article.

The first 50-or-so pages of the issue is about the recently departed Willie Mays. I like the photo spread of every one of his Topps cards.

My story shows up on page 72. It's about collector Roy Carlson, who has created a hobby buzz in the last year with his discoveries of picture reuse in Topps' vintage sets. I mentioned that I was doing a story on him in April and it has finally appeared in the August-September issue. 

 

I'm the last person that should be surprised by how slow the wheels operate in the world of print publication, but the ones for magazine publishing are the very slowest. I did the interview in April and wrote the story in May and it shows up three months later. I almost felt like I had to talk to Roy again to update everything!

 

But I think it's an interesting article anyway. I always feel like I'm doing my job more when I interview someone for one of these Beckett articles. That's the journalist in me. Still in newspapers there's a rule (at least at ours) that if you talk to people for a story, you get a byline. If you don't, you don't. I don't think readers really care -- or even notice -- the difference, and I try to tell myself that when my story doesn't contain interviews.

Anyway, that was a tangent. I really enjoyed talking to Roy. He's a regular collector with a love for vintage Topps sets (his first set was 1969 Topps). He had no research or investigative background before uncovering all of these examples of Topps' photo reuse. But I think his years of experience working for the Chicago Tribune (he's worked for the newspaper's production department for decades), may have given him a boost. His dedication is just amazing. As two folks with newspaper backgrounds, we commiserated about the state of print journalism during the interview.

 

I usually like to write a post that spins off of my Beckett article every time an issue comes out, but I don't have anything this time (at least not anything that wouldn't take three days of free time).

 

So instead, I'll just show a few examples of what was mentioned in the magazine article. This might be old news to folks who have already seen Roy's articles in Sports Collectors Digest, but I've got to pimp the article!

 

I spent the last post writing about all of the photo reuse in team cards so I'll leave the team cards alone this time (there's plenty of it in the magazine article). But this is an example of "that looks familiar" with some photo editing magic.

In the 1977 Topps card, note the men in red pants standing on each side, one a trainer and one an equipment manager. Now, look at the 1978 card. It's the same team picture, but the guys in red pants have been wiped out!

That might be my favorite example of Topps trickery that Roy Carlson discovered.

But there are a lot of other fun ones. Many of them are in the 1969 Topps All-Star subset.

The assumption with the black-and-white backgrounds with these cards is that it is an action photo of the player shown in the color head shot. That's the case in some of the cards. But in many of them, it's someone entirely different.

In Topps' "proud" history of photo reuse, it took images that had already appeared on cards and reappropriated them! The player behind Willie Horton is not Horton but Frank Howard from the 1964 Topps card recounting the 1963 World Series!

The player behind Carl Yastrzemski is not Yastrzemski fielding a baseball but likely the White Sox's Luis Aparacio "Scrambling After Ball" in the 1959 World Series, which was shown in the 1960 Topps set.

 

 

Then there's this daring performance in which Topps used a photo showing Al Kaline in the 1968 World Series to put in the background of Ron Santo's All-Star card and both cards are from the 1969 set!! How did we all miss this? Well ... I have an excuse, I was 3 and I didn't know what cards were then.

There are several other examples in the '69 All-Star subset, including one that only the word "egregious" can sum up. But I'll leave all those other examples for magazine readers -- or for when it shows up on the Beckett web site. (Some of my articles are available over there but for some you need to be a subscriber).

 

Roy has gone on to write articles about photo reuse in sets like 1968 Topps Game and the Topps posters sets from around the same time. His latest articles (I think) are about how the comic images from the backs of the 1954 Topps cards were reused in later sets like 1966 and 1967 Topps. He has a big-time production background and it's interesting to see him illustrate how those cards and posters, etc., were created back then -- I can remember some of that stuff when I was a young newspaper writer in the 1990s watching the "composing room" staff at work.

 

As for my article, it should appear on magazine racks and places like Barnes and Noble in a week or two (I often see it at one of my local grocery stores). This was my 19th article for Beckett and I just sent in my 20th this week!

 

Side bonus: you know that these articles help pay for some key cards to my collection, but they also come in handy for home improvements, and I got a small one done with this very article.

 

But as of now, I'm tapped out for story ideas. I need the magazine muse to do its thing.