1958-59 A&BC Gum Famous Footballers
A&BC's First Set
1958-59 A&BC Gum Famous Footballers
After writing about the 1975-76 Topps set the other day, I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the classic A&BC sets.
Based on this helpful website, it seems that A&BC Chewing Gum’s first bubble gum set was for the 1958-59 season.
Even the wrappers add to the confusion. As Nigel reports, there appear to be three distinct sizes for Series 1 cards (numbers 1 through 46):
The tab shows up at the top for some cards, but not for all cards — and the sizes of the portraits differ among cards of the same series.
It’s not clear whether cards of all sizes used the same distribution wrapper.
It also seems that a single pack contained only a single card, along with a stick of gum. If that’s true, it was a pretty archaic practice by that time: both Topps and Bowman were selling multiple baseball cards in single packs as early as the early 1950s.
Just as was the case with Topps 1975-76, these 1958-59 cards are not in particularly high demand. You can still find them for surprisingly cheap.
Searching on eBay will show you pie-in-the-sky auction prices like this one:
However, before you pay a small fortune for Finney, keep in mind that there aren’t a lot of sold listings out there anywhere near that price.
Note as well that the card people are willing to pay for tends to be Bobby Charlton.
The back of that Bobby Charlton “rookie” card is also a tad strange:
The second paragraph makes no sense. At age 20, Charlton was the second youngest member of that squad, behind only Peter Brabrook. Charlton already had 3 caps by the time he was named to the squad, having accumulated them shortly after he survived the famous Munich air disaster.
How in the world “both England and Bobby” would “benefit” from Charlton sitting on the bench for all three England draws is an absolute mystery to me.
Anyway, if you’re not particular about getting cards graded by PSA, you can find some good deals. Here’s a collection of 22 that sold for 6 pounds a few months ago:
And this collection of 39 cards, including the overpriced Finney listed above, came out to only 26 pounds after a small bidding war:
I’m not sure how many A&BC cards from this set survive, though I doubt the numbers are high. It seems that the speculators and aggressive investors have not yet discovered England’s football cards of the late 1950s.