BaseballCardsCollectors.com » The History of Topps Baseball Cards http://baseballcardscollectors.com Baseball Cards Collectors Fri, 14 May 2010 04:32:41 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The History of Topps Baseball Cards http://baseballcardscollectors.com/the-history-of-topps-baseball-cards.html http://baseballcardscollectors.com/the-history-of-topps-baseball-cards.html#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:58:11 +0000 Curtis http://baseballcardscollectors.com/?p=22 Although the Topps Company was officially founded in 1938, its history actually goes further back, when Morris Shorin began the American Leaf Tobacco Company in 1890. When World War I and later, the Great Depression, resulted in a decreased supply of tobacco from Turkey, the Shorin family, in Brooklyn, New York, began to produce chewing gum. The company was renamed Topps. Chewing gum tended to be sold in individual pieces in those days, and Topps gum was often kept by the cash registers, where customers were given the option of receiving pieces of gum rather than change. One piece of gum equaled one penny.

Trading cards were first introduced with the chewing gum as a way of promoting the sale of the gum. These early cards were not baseball cards, however. They were of Hopalong Cassidy, a popular Western character of the time. The first baseball cards that Topps produced, in 1951, were sets known as “Red Backs” and Blue Backs”. Each card had a blank side that was either red or blue, with the picture of a baseball player on the other side. These sets contained 52 cards, and could be used to play a game, similar to a regular card game.

Many valuable rookie cards have been discovered in packages of Topps. The 1952 set, which was designed at the kitchen table of Topps employee Sy Berger, continues to be very highly prized among collectors of sports cards. The popularity of baseball cards is due, in great part, to the Topps Company.

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