1990 Topps Frank Thomas NNOF August 1995 Beckett Write-Up: 25 Years Later

A quick look at two pages from the August 1995 Beckett Baseball Magazine outlining the most up-to-date info on the card at the time. The ‘Readers Write’ letter is interesting to me as it tackles the big question surrounding the legitimacy of this printing error vs. others and the generally accepted hypocrisy applied to it. Also noticeable is how their example does not contain the tiny piece of Frank’s name commonly (but not always) found on the iconic print flaw. Theo Chen’s estimation of 500 to 1000 and possibly even “less than 100” copies is laughable 25 years later. While truly a needle-in-a-haystack card, far more than 1000 copies have surfaced since.

Bonus: January 1994 NNOF Pricing

Record Sale For 1990 Topps Frank Thomas No Name On Front Error

Not mine, but I sure wish it was…

http://cgi.ebay.com/FRANK-THOMAS-1990-TOPPS-RC-NNOF-NONAME-FRONT-BGS-8-5-/360385899834?pt=US_Baseball&hash=item53e8ac6d3a

A benchmark sale for the Junk Wax Gem of Gems!

Truly an ode to the power of the catalog’s recognition coupled with star factor. How many unlisted printing flaws could $2K get you?

 

 

1992 Topps Blackless (Missing Ink) Variations

A recent trip to the card shop in search of some junk boxes yielded one1992 Topps Wax Box and one 1997 Score Hobby Reserve Box (complete waste of money). The Topps box was quite a score because almost every other pack had two Match The Stats game cards, which were the primary reason for the purchase. But in the last quarter of packs, these two cards popped out:

Quick Look: 1990 Topps Roger Salkeld #44 Variation

About a year or two ago, I got into a major 1990 Topps Baseball kick. I was on the hunt for new variations in this suspiciously variation-free set, a set surrounded by two of Topps’ most problematic issues: 1989 and 1991. I was certain that many new varieties were out there just waiting to be found and that all it would take is a massive sampling of different packaging types and a lot of time. Unfortunately, not much came out of this research, but one of the more interesting things I discovered is that the holiday factory sets almost always had 1 or 2 cards missing portions of their black ink. And almost all of them were NOT from the famous “orange sheet” that includes Frank Thomas’ card. One sweet example of this is card #44, then uber-prospect, Roger Salkeld. Take a look at the lower left of the card: it’s missing all of it’s black ink in that area.

1990 Topps Frank Thomas NNOF – Mystery Unraveled

One of the most important error cards of modern card collecting is the 1990 Topps Frank Thomas “No name on front” variation.It often tops the “10-most-wanted” lists of many collectors, not just error collectors. A massive mistake affecting one of the game’s biggest stars

For years, speculation ensued, until just over a year ago, a devoted Big Hurt collector, known on the Collector’s Universe message boards as BunchOBull, started putting the pieces together, in turn summoning others interested in tying up the loose ends of this fascinating card’s production history. One of the most-impressive examples of a collecting community coming together to figure out the origin of an ambiguous issue with little-to-no previous factual information publicly available, this is a must-read for the error collector:

“1990 Topps Frank Thomas NNOF revisited…introduction to my theory”

Originally posted on the Collectors Universe Forums by BunchOBull  (followed by numerous contributors).