518. 1953 Topps Complete Set (274)
The massive popularity of the 1952 Topps baseball set presented a unique challenge to Topps’ designers: how do you follow up a near- perfect set? The answer was the beautifully-designed 1953 issue. With card art consisting of hand-painted renditions of player photographs, each player’s team and position information appears in a dark border at the card bottom (red for American League and black for National League) along with a team logo. The reverse contains statistical and biographical information as well as a trivia question. The designs were so beautiful and vivid that many collectors today prefer the 1953 set to its predecessor. The 274-card 1953 set includes a number of challenges to completion, including second-year cards of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays an extremely tough run of high numbers a host of difficult single prints an extremely condition-sensitive #1 card of Jackie Robinson and tough rookie cards of Johnny Podres and Jim Gilliam. While the 1952 issue can be a nightmare to complete the 1953 set is certainly no picnic. Presented here is a very attractive mixed-grade set, loaded with wonderful examples of well-centered, sharp cards that exhibit very little of the ubiquitous chipping at the dark borders on the higher- grade cards. The cards are clean and colorful, with many of the cards
of lower technical grade presenting better than the assigned grades. Many of the lower-grade cards appear in the high number series, as the low numbers are, in general, in better shape. However, the set as a whole is quite strong. A technical breakdown of the cards is as follows: 1% NM, 3% EX-MT, 10% EX, 22% VG-EX, 31% VG, 21% GOOD, 11% FAIR, and a few lesser. We have taken the liberty of submitting many of the set’s key cards to PSA for grading. The cards graded as follows: #1 Robinson (PSA VG 3), #27 Campanella (PSA EX-MT 6), #31 Blackwell (PSA NM 7), #35 Noren (PSA EX 5), #37 Mathews (PSA VG-EX 4), #43 McDougald (PSA EX-MT 6), #54 Feller (PSA EX-MT 6), #66 Minoso (PSA EX 5), #76 Reese (PSA VG-EX 4), #82 Mantle (PSA GOOD 2), #104 Berra (PSA EX-MT 6), #114 Rizzuto (PSA VG-EX+ 4.5), #147 Spahn (PSA VG 3), #207 Ford (PSA FR 1.5), #220 Paige (PSA GOOD 2), #244 Mays (PSA VG+ 3.5). Additional keys grade as follows: #41 Slaughter (G), #61 Wynn (G), #62 Irvin (VG-EX), #77 Mize (EX), #78 Schoendienst (VG-EX), #138 Kell (VG-EX), #151 Wilhelm (VG), #191 Kiner (G), #228 Newhouser (F). Largely a strong, mixed-grade example that, with a few upgrades, would make for a strong investment. 274 cards total.
MINIMUM BID: $1,000
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