Monday, January 28, 2019

A really nit-picky thing I discovered about 1995 Calbee


This week I picked up a few more cards for my 1995 Calbee/Tokyo Snack set.  I am actually really close to finishing the first series, I have 64 out of 72 so just 8 to go (I have both Ichiros already,  all the ones I need are commons so it should be pretty easy to finish that one!).

The high series (73 to 162) on the other hand I am nowhere near to completing, I only have 19 of them and need the Ichiros, which are among the most expensive of his cards out there. So that project will take a while. They seem to have been issued in much fewer numbers than the low numbers, hence my difficulty in tracking them down!

But in addition to bragging about how close I am to finishing the first series I also want to use this post to highlight a weird thing I have discovered about this set.  I was flipping through them yesterday when I noticed an odd thing: the cards are not all the same shape!

The difference lies in the corners, which seem to have been cut in three different ways.  This isn't really noticeable if you are looking at the cards one by one, but if you hold a stack of them you will notice that the corners on the cards don't line up evenly.

There seem to be three different shaped corners:


The right most card in the above photo (card 8 of Ken Suzuki) has a rounded corner.  The one in the middle (card 37 of Glenn Braggs) has been cut at more of a straight angle.  The left most card (51 of Shintaro Yamasaki) also has a rounded corner but the curve extends for a longer extent (ie its a bigger rounded corner).

Calbee used a similar design for most of its sets between the 1990 high series and 1996, with the same cardstock and rounded corners, I haven't yet checked to see if the cards from other sets have this same weird feature.  I'm not sure what caused it, they must have been using different machines to cut the cards from their sheets or something like that.

Anyway, just another obscure, nit-picky thing I thought I'd throw out into the card blogosphere!

6 comments:

  1. Interesting variations. I wonder if there are more variations of the rounded corners... and if any given card were cut multiple ways (or were all #37 cut with more of a straight angle).

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    1. Yeah, I'm wondering about that too, its possible there are multiple versions of each card cut with different corners! I don't have enough of them to tell yet....

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  2. Nice catch. Do you know If the low numbered cards have one type and the corners get more rounded as the numbers get higher?

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    1. I haven't been able to find any pattern yet, they seem to be more or less randomly distributed numerically speaking. This might just be because I don't have a large enough pile to analyze them en masse!

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  3. Look on the bright side, you don't have to worry about corners when you submit them in for grading.

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    1. Actually I wonder what PSA would do with cards that have three different types of corner?

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