This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/15/2017
As we've stated previously, the "Beer Box Find" in our last auction and the sequel of amazing material in this auction come from a family that owned and operated a confectionery company that produced trading cards since the 1950s. All of the "Beer Box" material offered in this auction, the previous auction, and perhaps future auctions, was acquired at the time it was released for the purposes of research and development. When Topps chose to increase the size of their football cards in 1965, the production and distribution of these "tall-boys" had the company making certain decisions that hadn't had to be addressed since they changed the size of their baseball cards in 1957; what size to make the new cards, how to format them on the sheet, resizing the wrapper, the wax box, the case, how many cards to a pack and how many packs to a box, etc. So it stands to reason that a smaller company like the one owned by the family of our consignor might snap up a couple of these boxes to see if the increased card size was something they could take advantage of for their own purposes. Whether they gained any insight as to how to better their own product is unknown, but acquiring two wax boxes of 1965 Topps football cards and putting away the material not used for research seems to have become quite a lucrative decision 50 years later. Presented is a near full wax box containing 21 of the 24 packs of 1965 Topps cards, all in untouched NM to NM/MT+ condition. As with much of the other material consigned to this auction, the three missing packs were removed as part of the research and it would be interesting to know if one of them contained the legendary Joe Namath RC or even one of the extremely difficult checklist cards. Other than the packs in this offering and the complete box offered in another lot, there aren't more than just a handful of 1965 Topps football packs known to exist. Steve Hart of Baseball Card Exchange has examined the packs and verified that they are original and unopened, sealing the box and providing his Letter of Authenticity from BBCE. What makes this unopened material particularly enticing to speculators is that there has never been a GEM MINT example of Joe Namath's rookie card graded by either PSA or SGC, and some experts believe that if one did finally break through, it might command upwards of one million dollars. In fact, only 13 cards total from this series have reached the PSA 10 level out of over 25,000 submissions, none of which are the key cards - Namath, Biletnikoff, Alworth and the checklists. Not many post-war issues, not even the 1948 Bowman near full box offered in or last auction, offer the potential payoff for pack-rippers than this series does. But that's for the new owner to decide. If the cards come anywhere close to matching the quality of the packs, and the high bidder is willing to lay it on the line, we could be seeing some unprecedented tall-boys on the market before long.