Night Owl Cards

  In order to keep this series in my head and not forget about it for a year, I'm running another version of "Joy of a Subset" three months later, which is a little sooner than I'd like as I usually space them out more.  Tonight I'm going way back, to what you could argue was the first "out-of-the-box" topic for a subset in Topps history.   Subsets were a new idea for Topps in the '50s. If you define subsets by how I knew them in the 1970s, they are at least three consecutively numbered cards, all sharing the same theme. Topps' first experience with that approach is in 1958 with the 21-card Sport Magazine All-Stars that come at the end of the set.   The All-Stars return in 1959, but using The Sporting News as the sponsor. The Sporting News appears again in the set with a string of 31 "Rookie Stars of 1959" all featuring the same red, white and blue background.    But as evidence that Topps embraced the subset idea completely, there was ...