Bookshelf “Double Play” Review: When Baseball Was Still Topps and Topps Baseball Cards: The Complete Picture Collection (A 35-Year History, 1951-1985)

A bit of a clunky title, sorry.

I was a bit too young to start my collection with Topps’ 1959 series, being only two years old with no disposable income, but I always get a kick out of seeing the old cards and how they compare with today’s Hydra of variety.

I started reading Phil, Coffin’s When Baseball Was Still Topps: Portraits of the Game in 1959, Card by Card Coffin must have done a lot of research to come up with something interesting to say about each card; not all feature just a single player, there are checklists, team cards, league leaders, All-stars, etc. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of examples which I suppose is kind of unfair. It probably would have been prohibitively expensive to produce, even if Topps did give permission.

The project reminded me of Aaron to Zuverink: A Nostalgic Look at the Baseball Players of the Fifties by Rich Marazzi and Len Fiorito, which offered brief snippets for every player, regardless of their card status (Coffin points out that Ted Williams was not included in the 1959 Topps set due to business conflicts). Marazzi and Fiorito also published Aaron to Zipfel which covered all the players from the 1960s.

Fortunately, I also have a copy of Topps Baseball Cards: The Complete Picture Collection (A 35-Year History, 1951-1985) so I was able to cross-reference each item Coffin described.

Topps Baseball Cards is a beauty, the very model of a coffee-table gift book although they just featured the photo side of the cards. However it is 40 years out of date. I would love to see a revised edition, but given how big and expensive the original was, I can only imagine what a monster that would be, even if they just stuck to the base set rather than include all the variations that have come out over the past several years. (Just FYI, it weighs in at nine pounds and is more than 700 pages. Is this a book or a newborn baby?)

Coffin also published A Baseball Book of Days: Thirty-One Moments That Transformed the Game earlier this year.