1955 TOPPS 75 TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION AUCTION
T here were no escaping legal troubles for Topps in 1955, and they had to settle for a 206-card set, which painfully saw four high number subjects excised, an unfortunate result of Bowman’s contractual rights prevailing over theirs. This resulted in their all-time shortest vintage era set but did little to dampen the impressive designs still flowing from the art service of Solomon & Gelman. The orientation was flipped from vertical to horizontal and both the large portrait and small background action photos returned, with everything colorized using the Flexichrome process. Roberto Clemente is the headline rookie, but Sandy Koufax and Harmon Killebrew also debuted in the set. Topps issued a second set in 1955 called Double Header, a foldable, illustrated card that cleverly showed two different players one you folded the flap. These metamorphic cards were sold one at a time in penny form and when placed next to each in their “open” position, depict several different continuous ballpark scenes. These are condition sensitive and feature big names such as Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, and Hank Aaron. A short series of colorful, large, gummed stamps featuring around 40 subjects, not all of which are presently identified, were experimented with but ultimately never sold to the public. These in-house creations would become more prevalent in the next decade and eventually result in true test marketed sets, but this is the earliest one known, and the stamps are incredibly rare. If that wasn’t enough, Topps decided to revisit the self- developing Magic Photo set and issued a very similar one called Hocus Focus, this time featuring mostly current players. Confounding collectors to this day, Hocus Focus came in two lengths and dimensions, both around the size of postage stamps but with each clearly distinguishable from the other. The larger of the two saw 96 cards and an 18 card Baseball Stars subset, which the small version incorporated, adding five more Baseball Stars and thirty subjects overall. The smaller cards of the two are quite scarce as they were only issued in one cent packs, and the thirty additional subjects are increasingly prized by collectors. The five extra Baseball Stars include Eddie Mathews and, significantly, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
111. 1955 Topps Five-Cent Wax Pack - PSA VG 3 MINIMUM BID: $5,000
112. 1955 Topps Complete Set (206) MINIMUM BID: $1,500
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