1952 Topps Mickey Mantle #311 PSA EX-MT 6....

Description

1952 Topps Mickey Mantle #311 PSA EX-MT 6. "Switch-hitting Mickey is heralded as Joe DiMaggio's successor," begins the text on the back of the most coveted post-war trading card in the hobby, prophetic words from a young copywriter at the young Topps company, best known at the time for Bazooka bubble gum and the Hopalong Cassidy cowboy trading cards first issued in 1950. It was Sy Berger, a twenty-eight year old veteran of the Second World War, who envisioned a Topps set dedicated to Major League Baseball, designing the format with his friend Woody Gelman on the kitchen table of his Brooklyn apartment. Berger would later famously hire a garbage boat to dump leftover boxes from the 1952 set into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey to free up warehouse space, a bounty that would today be worth several million dollars. A watery grave would be the fate for most of the high-number series from which the fabled Mantle rookie derives, a victim of slow production and distribution that left this last edition of the set unable to reach most points of sale prior to the end of the baseball season. This calculated destruction, paired with the standard Eisenhower-era themes of bicycle spokes and spring-cleaning mothers, has left the balance between supply and demand for the Mick's rookie heavily tipped toward the latter.

Here we present a simply marvelous representation of the hobby's most important post-war card. Assessed at PSA EX-MT 6 by the expert graders at PSA. Bright, bold coloring and gloss, perfect registration provide the look of a superior example, with minimal edge and corner wear and marginally askew left/right centering describe what we feel is an under-graded example. Absent are any of the stains or wrinkles common to this six-decade old issue. After years in the hobby and the pleasure of bringing dozens of '52 Mantle cards to auction, and dozens more in appraisal situations this is by far the nicest "EX-MT" copy we have experienced. A rock-solid example of a card that seems to appear with greater infrequency as each finds its way into a permanent collection.

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