Anonymous Collectibles NJ said...

“Let me see if I got this right. You buy low grade

beat up cards and feature them on your blog.

That’s awesome. Totally different than all the

other blogs I have seen featuring the nicest cards.”


8.13.2008

1954 Red Heart
Alvin Dark


Over the past couple of months I've posted baseball cards that could have been found on cereal boxes, in cereal boxes, on boxes of Twinkies, in bags of potato chips and various other places.

This card would have been found with dog food.

Yep, dog food.

My understanding is that if you would mail in a couple of labels of Red Heart dog food and ten cents, you could receive one of three subsets (11 cards) of this issue. A total of three subsets were made for a total of 33 cards. Each subset was differentiated by its background color. Cards either came with a green, blue or red background.

One interesting thing is that in 1954, Cardinals star Stan Musial appeared in this set but not in the popular Topps and Bowman sets. Mickey Mantle also appears here while not appearing with Topps.

Red Heart did a nice job making a simple and attractive issue. With Dan Dee, Red Heart provided at least some competition in 1954 to the big two gum companies of Topps and Bowman.

2 comments:

capewood said...

The design of this card is exactly the same as the 2007 Bowman Heritage Prospects subset. I wonder if the Red Heart cards weren't actually published by Bowman.

pobc said...

I know that in the case of Stan Musial, he did not appear in both Topps and Bowman because of money. They apparently didn't offer him enough. So I don't think Bowman had anything to do with the production of Red Heart. I don't know if Red Heart exists today and I don't know if the design was copyrighted but it appears that 53 years later, Topps and Bowman got the last laugh.