1953 Bowman Black and White

Here's some more cards that came as a result of my recent Bowman purchases and a bit of my ignorance.

I knew that there were both color and black and white cards from Bowman in 1953.  When I bought my reprints years ago I got the colored cards because wouldn't rather have color instead of black and white.

When I recently replaced the reprints with the real deals, I got the colored version, too.

Just for kicks I started looking at how available the black and white cards were.  As I was looking over the Cubs I got confused.  The black and white players were not the same as the ones in color.  Then I had one of those Duh! moments.

The black and white cards are a totally different set.

Bowman was fighting back at Topps after the salvo Topps fired in 1952.  Upping the ante, Bowman's 1953 cards featured photographs, not portraits.  Printing photographs was a much-more expensive process.

Too expensive, apparently.  Because over the summer, Bowman stopped the colored set and continued with a set set of cheaper-to-make black and white cards.  The checklist starts at 1 and goes up to 64 and features players not included in the 160-card color set.


So if I want to have all of the 1953 Bowman Cubs, I needed to get the black and white cards.  I was able to find all of them on Ebay.  Some came via auction and others were BIN.  There were six Cubs among the 64 black and whites, and now I've got all of them.

 

 

 

The design is identical to the color cards, with the color missing.  Since there are no names on the front, I'll tell you that we have:

Top Row:  Dee Fondy and Randy Jackson

Middle Row: Hal Jeffcoat and Dutch Leonard

Bottom Row: Bob Ramazzotti and Roy Smalley