1988 Topps Baseball Forum

Greetings,

I recently picked up two 1988 Topps Baseball "Cut Card" boxes.  I don't know very much about cut card boxes and am looking to the experts here for more knowledge.  All I know is what the card store owner told me.  The boxes were the same size as a vending case and were plain cardboard with no markings on them except a series of letters (more on that below).  Please correct me if I am wrong, but isn't a cut card box essentially the same as a vending case, except the cards are not in the individual 500 ct boxes?  The cards were neatly stacked in the boxes, but just loose.  I didn't count them out exactly, but with each cut card box, I filled up 3-3200 count monster boxes  which would be around 9,600 cards give or take.  I believe a vending case is 20-500 count boxes for a total of 10,000?

I know that some of the cut card boxes only came in certain "Series" or printing runs.  Series/Print Run "A" was 1-132. Series/Print Run "B" was 133-264 etc.  I got lucky, as both cut card boxes were stamped "ABCDEF", so all print runs are accounted for, so the cards range are the full 1-792.  From what I was told, some of the boxes are only stamped "A", or "B", or "AB" etc. and would only contain those cards from that print run(s) in that box.

Finally, I noticed that a handful of cards in each box were cut incorrectly, more like parallelograms rather than rectangles.  They all match up to each other (like a puzzle) and they were clearly part of the same sheet.  Maybe the cut card boxes didn't have the same quality control as vending boxes?

Thannks for any info you can provide!

V