In 1968, Topps produced a set of Action Stickers as part of a never-ending quest to find products that would score with their young audience. Some of you may be doing a double take right now. Action .. what? The ’68 Action Stickers are not well known outside the corps of serious collectors and fans of Topps history. How scarce are they? Consider that PSA has graded fewer than 200 of them…total! How scarce are they in high grade? There are none graded higher than 8 (and there are only 7 of those) and just seven stickers graded 7. This week, we’ve got 11 of them up for sale—all graded—and many are the best examples known. Some are graded by PSA and some by SGC. The ’68 Action Sticker set is a quirky little issue with 16 single players and several featuring multiple players. They were sold in elongated strips of three panels, with each separated by a perforation and folded into packs. It’s that method that has made the relatively few surviving examples so tough to find. Many of these were likely used for their intended purpose by the kids who bought them in the tumultuous summer of ’68—they were stuck on something and never heard from again. Collectors today love those that are left. It’s a set loaded with star power and you’ll find several of them among our listings including a gorgeous PSA 7 Carl Yastrzemski. Remember, this was just after his Triple Crown winning season of 1967 when he took the Red Sox on his back and carried them to the World Series. There’s a Harmon Killebrew, an Al Kaline and multiple stickers featuring Tom Seaver. Despite the relatively pedestrian grades, these are incredible pieces. Very bright and clean with negligible wear when compared to similarly graded baseball cards. Collectors who understand the concept of supply and demand know how cool these are and if you pass them by, it might be awhile before anything remotely similar passes by again.
