This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 6/10/2010
Graded NM+ 7.5 by PSA. Offered is without thought the enduring image of our hobby, a 1952 Topps #311 Mickey Mantle. Advanced enthusiasts as well as novices alike can tell you about this card as it seems this pasteboard transcends our hobby with the "real world". This prestigious cardboard artifact is widely viewed in the hobby as a badge of American pop culture and mere ownership moves the collecting needle from also ran to elite. With that said I am reminded of the primary reason for this card's grip on the American imagination, and that would be its utter scarcity. With hardly more than 1,000 total examples surfacing since the advent of grading, it becomes clear just how scarce the 1952 Topps "High Numbers" really are, a fact often confused by Mantle's somewhat misleading designation as a double-print. To be brief, the 1952 Topps issue was printed on six sheets, each containing 100 cards, several of which, like card #311, appear twice per sheet. Continuously printing throughout the 1952 Major League baseball season, however, the newly formed Topps Company had been playing catch-up to consumer demand all summer, releasing cards #311-407 from the sixth and final sheet just in time for the World Series and the transition into the off-season. As such, demand took a quick dive, and the majority of cards produced never reached Topps' New York City warehouse. Sy Berger, the so-called "father of modern day baseball cards," then tried to push the extra inventory in Canada and in Series I packs of the 1953 issue, but to no avail. As a final recourse in the early 1960's, in a move that would ironically mirror the actions of countless closet-clearing mothers across the country, he filled two garbage trucks with the extra inventory and dumped it off the coast of New Jersey where it now sleeps with the fishes. Heartbreaking but true. The offered specimen would be ideal for the discriminating collector with a preference for a superior amount of eye appeal highlighted by the stunning overall zeal of the offered pasteboard. At first inspection the four corners of this behemoth of a sports card appear well within the guidelines of a superiorly assessed specimen but upon a closer look it is ever so subtly evident that the upper right corner a micro touch at the extreme tip of the corner allowing the exceptional conservative graders at PSA an out with the tough love grade of NM+ although the card could be justified by a NM/MT evaluation. The edges likewise range from NM/MT to NM/MT+, and accentuate the superior image of this wonderful example. Most important of all, the printed image displays virtually un-improvable qualities in every regard, with perfect registration and a perfectly immaculate surface beneath a smooth and evenly dispersed coating of gloss. The direction of the stitching on the baseball surrounding the card number indicates that this is the marginally more desirable Type II variety, favored for its absence of a white print imperfection in the upper left field found on all Type I varieties, which also show an incomplete black border around the Yankees logo. In short, offered is a seemingly NM/MT+ to MINT 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle that favors the left edge. With hardly enough examples in any condition to satisfy the exponentially increasing demand for this monumental card, future hobbyists will soon be weighing the opportunity to acquire NM specimens against real-estate acquisitions and other less manageable and less enjoyable investments. Presented in outstanding and imaginative NM+ condition teetering on the NM/MT grade