Topps celebrated the big expansion year of 1961 with a series of stamps, over 200. More important was the issue of what you do with stamps. Topps had the answer. For ten cents, you could buy a special album for those baseball stamps, available at the same candy shop that sold the cards.

 The album, featuring a bright green cover, was a fairly basic affair which gave kids everywhere a little something extra for their nickels and dimes. 

The big difference for the new, improved 1962 stamps is color. Topps, like the previous year, the stamps were offered in pairs in wax and cellophane wrapped packs of cards. 

Like the previous year, an album was offered for a dime at the local candy store, to be filled up by eager kids happily licking the stamps. But there were also a few differences.

The design was a little bit plainer, so as not to distract from the color portrait. Each player was shown from the neck up, against a single-color background, consisting of either bright yellow or orange-red. Interestingly, there was no pattern to the yellow or red backgrounds. 

Unlike the green or brown stamps of the previous year, the different colors were issued at the same time, often appearing together on the attached strips of two found in each pack.

The album offered as a final resting place for the stamps was distinctly different in a number of ways. The cover was a bright orange rather than green, and instead of featuring a close-up drawing of a batter, it featured a full drawing of a pitcher in mid-stride.

Inside was the most dramatic change from the previous year. Each pair of pages set aside for the twenty major league teams (the New York Mets and the Houston Colt 45’s having joined the National League) featured photos of the stamps themselves in the album. That’s right; no more improvisation was required; you knew exactly which players made up the set and which ones you were missing, because black and white pictures of the entire set were provided.

Also, the team histories were replaced by each player’s vital stats for the previous season and for his career, nine players per team. A colorful team logo was included for every team, to be placed at the head of each team’s album page.

Aesthetically, it’s a judgment call as to which set was more pleasing. There are many who will always prefer color to black and white (or green or brown as the case may be). But the color process was by no means perfected by 1962 – the stamps suffered from slight registry problems, so many of them do seem a bit blurry. A greater number of the 1962 stamps seem to turn up badly miscut, for reasons that aren’t clear.

The makeup of the set is roughly the same as the previous year – there are 27 Hall of Famers (13% of the set), and 28 of the stamps (13.5%) use the same photos as that year’s card set. 

Only two of the players in the set can be termed rookies (Ty Cline and Bob Rodgers). And only one player is shown with the “wrong” team – pitcher Bob Shaw is shown with the Kansas City A’s, whereas his card (appearing in the set’s first series) has his affiliation updated to show him with the Milwaukee Braves. That seems to indicate that the stamp set was prepared really, really early in the 1961/1962 off-season.

As for players among the missing, Koufax and Clemente made it to the 1962 set, but Bob Gibson is STILL not there. Of course, the 1962 set is more exclusive than the previous year was—Topps went from producing 208 stamps showing 207 different players, in a season with 18 teams in the majors - to producing a set with only 180 players spread over 20 teams. Not many marginal players making the cut.

The mint attached pairs seem to have survived a bit more plentifully for the 1962 set than for the previous year, but it’s not a big difference. In fact, most values for the two sets are about the same, whether it’s for commons, Hall of Famers or for the albums.

That’s particularly important for the 1962 set, because there’s an ongoing urban legend about Roy Sievers. Sievers, a heavy hitting first baseman whose career stretched from the early Fifties to the mid-Sixties, was with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1962, and he’s shown with them in that year’s album. 

However, most checklists for the set, including SCD’s ultimate checklist book, list a variation that shows Sievers with the Kansas City Athletics. I’m here to say that this stamp is probably an urban legend.

The 1962 set consists of 200 stamps – 180 players and 20 team emblems.

So, that sums up Topps’ first two major insert sets, those little something extras they threw in for the price of a pack. They’re unique and collectible, and they deserve the interest of true hobbyists.