Hey Guys,
I see that people call some of the 1957 Parkhurst cards SP's shortprints...just wondering who started this and why.

Parkhurst sheets generally have 11 x 11 cards or 121 cards per sheet, if anything there are 29 double prints but probably better to be called 21 triple prints.

Any thoughts anyone?

I am largely uneducated about the 57 Parkie set as a whole, but I will say that I have not found the cards to be very difficult to find in relation to other short print cards from other sets. They are tough in nm-mt, but all Parkies from the 50's are tough in nm-mt or better. It certainly sounds good to say they are sp's, as there is star power galore in them hills.

-Nathanael

The 1957 Parkhurst set was the first graded set that I completed. When I started building this set, those cards were listed as SP in the Beckett. All the big dealers said they were so difficult to find... All I know is that they each carried a high premium over the other cards in the set. It seems to me that the Doug Harvey was the one I saw the least, but the 2 Richard cards were the last 2 I bought to complete my set.

By the time I started working on this set in the late 90's, the first 5 cards of each of the 2 series had already been declared to be SP's.

It would seem that Beckett no longer has these listed as shortprints, does anyone have an old Beckett to see if they have them listed as such?

I have a couple old Beckett price guides and I couldn't find any reference to short prints. In the Charlton Catalogue, a couple editions claim the first 5 cards in each series are short prints. By Charlton Edition 9, there isn't a write up claiming short prints, but the same 10 cards have a asterisk by the players name. For other sets, anything with an asterisk is considered a "short print", whether there is a description or not.

Thanks Scott, so with that being said, where does that leave us? Considering the assumed sheet count to be 121 and 50 cards being in the set, it would be fair to say there are some double or triple prints, not sure if you could really call them short prints but definately 29 cards would have a 2/3 production ratio.

Would it not seem strange that SP's would be in numerical order without being separated by series? Part of the reason why I didn't give credence to this SP denotation is because it doesn't jive with how other SP's were purposefully created in other vintage sets.

-Nathanael

I remember buying packs of this year back in 1957 and I can tell you for sure that the first 5 cards in the Montreal and Toronto series were not issued on an equal basis with the other 40 cards. I kept getting Andre Pronovost, Bert Olmstead, Billy Harris etc. but seldom the first five. It took me months to put a set together, back then we called it a deck. I would estimate the ratio of at least 10 to 1 in the print run for each of the other 40 cards compared to the first 5 of each team. Also when I found 16 unopened packs several years ago not one card from the first 5 was showing on the front or back. There were 32 easier cards and not 1 from the short prints.

Hi Mel,

Wow, that is cool to have first hand info on this subject. I feel sort of guilty now about having picked up Beliveau, Henri Richard, and Maurice Richard relatively easily over the past few years. I have little appreciation for how hard it was to finish a set.

I can share how difficult it was to complete a set of 1989-90 Topps. I kept getting Brian Leetch rookies and Patrick Roy's. Uggh.

Thanks for the info and perspective.

Nathanael

Hey Mel. Nice to see you on the forum. Jim.

when there are double printed cards on a sheet

Dan, it would almost be fair to say but the ration of 2/3 doesn't work the same as 1/2 with a single print ration. Its all about how many were on the sheet.

Even though this is from 1962, I think it represents what they did a few years earlier. This is a double sheet, it is the maximum printing space that printers could print, all Topps came the same way as well.