[Merkle923]

The starting point is that these were never intended to be made available to the public. By definition a "proof" was not sold in packs or in other traditional ways. They were internal products - produced and usually maintained as uncut sheets of 33 or 66 cards - serving to make sure colors and logos and photos and everything else were right.

There would be no records made of any kind. Topps has no archivist or historian and is often stumped by stuff that turns up in old boxes.

That sad, for years some proofs - usually cut by hand from sheets and almost always showing a variation from the card actually published - drifted into the hobby via Topps employees. Most notably all the 1967 Maris cards listing him with the Yankees were sold to a dealer named Bruce Yeko. In 1989 Topps held an auction in New York in which it sold basically everything it had in its sprawling plant in Brooklyn. Literally hundreds of sheets of "proofs" were sold, and most cut into individual cards. About ten years later as eBay was taking off "The Topps Vault" was created and what they didn't sell in 1989 they have been selling there.

Each card sheet would be printed in each possible color combination - just black and white, or yellow and blue, or full color. I think the number varied per year but tops out at about 12 different. In some years there would be additional variables - cards printed on paper instead of cardboard, or on glossy stock ("slick"), or in smaller sizes, or just the photographs with no card design overlay, etc.

For our purposes the unused and used player negatives are from a vast photo archive - I was given the opportunity to inspect it and do research using it - of literally at least a million images. Even posting 20 new baseball images a day and generously assuming they've already sold 100,000 negatives there is no chance they could run out of new ones to sell before the year 2143.

And that doesn't account for the fact that there are also hundreds of thousands of football and basketball negatives left as well.

And they photographed everybody they could find. There are trainers, spring training instructors, coaches, even a few announcers - and especially any player in uniform. So Topps - and the Chicago based photographers George Burke and George Brace - are the primary sources for every obscure player before 1990 or so...like Glenn Redmon here, who was with the Giants for exactly seven games in 1974: