Not Quite Mint Condition

Who needs borders? Many of the "premium" card brands out there don't need them; there is a lot of borderless design on them. Stadium Club has offered borderless, full-bleed photography for almost 30 years, and the result is often stunning. For a stretch between 2016 and 2020, Topps didn't even bother with borders on its flagship set. I have seen cards that look beautiful with borders and some that look great without them.

But somewhere out there are collectors who believe that every card should be borderless. This belief runs so deep that they are willing to remove the borders from their cards. I recently received the former property of one of those collectors, with blogger Bo as the intermediary. 

These 1958 Topps cards once had borders, but somewhere along the way somebody decided they looked better without them, so off they went. For reference, I left them in the page they were shipped in. You can see how much smaller they are. And here is one of them in its full, unblemished state:

 

Bo put a few of these up for trade on his blog. At just about the same time, I bought a lot of vintage cards that were also in somewhat less than mint condition. Coincidentally, I had a couple for his 1969 set build, so I claimed these three obscure former All-Stars for my All-Star project.

I picked up three lots: 1969 Topps baseball, 1977 Topps baseball, and 1975 Topps football. These were some of the keepers for my collection. I'm especially pleased with the variety of football HOF players. But you can see the condition is horrid. We have creases, paper loss, writing, and poor Rico Petrocelli has a chunk taken out. But they work for my collection.

Here is another way to look at the condition of these 40+ year-old cards.

But hey, they landed me a trade with Bo. And if this type of condition doesn't bother you, here is what I have available for trade. I didn't put them for trade on TCDB because I didn't feel good about that. But for you blog readers who have seen what we're dealing with here, I don't mind making a trade if you want some of these old cards. (Links to the TCDB checklist for each set so you can see who the player is.)

1969 Topps: 114, 136, 143, 182, 217, 253, 302, 334, 337, 344, 341, 349, 363, 369, 499, 505

1977 Topps: 5, 20, 26, 178, 294, 310, 356, 474, 526, 545, 562, 597, 607

1975 Topps (FB): 24, 96, 98, 115, 139, 161, 206, 342, 360

If anything is of interest to you, these old clunkers can be yours.