1962 Topps Baseball Forum

Okay, so I've alway been curious about vintage pack prices and contents and recently decidedly to delve deeper into '50s-'60s wax packs knowledge.  Before 1966, you could buy either 1-cent and 5-cent wax packs or 10-cent cello packs.   

The 1-cent wax packs obviously came with only one card except in 1951, when they actually came with two cards. 

The 5-cent wax packs only contained 5 cards in their latter years, but there are lots of suggestions that at some point, they contained up to 6 cards.  So far, I haven't found any definitive evidence of when the change occurred, but I see a lot of different sites claiming one way or another.  I think they might be doing it from memory though. 

The 10-cent cello packs had 12 cards in the early '60s, which I can verify from live pack breaks. 

Does anyone have any more information on when nickel packs went from 6 cards to 5 cards?  Wikipedia says 1960 was the last year of 6-card nickel packs.

As far as I remember, there were 5 cards and one stick of gum in a nickel wax pack.   I could be wrong so I emailed  a few other geezers with a better memory than mine to see what they say.  I think the confusion is because you got six "things" in a pack,  one stick of gum and five cards equals 6.    I remember, occasionally you got lucky and a pack would have six cards but that was simply due to Topps packaging screw ups.   I don't remember ever getting seven in a pack though I am sure it did happen, rarely.   When I a reply from my co-geezers, I will post again.       The reason I said that I dont remember getting 7 in a pack is because if 6 was the standard number, there would have been many screw ups and a number of packs would have had 7 which they never or rarely did.

 My experts have all replied.     5 Cards and 1 stick of gum.

I'm not so much asking "if" as much as I am asking  "when" the change occurred from 6-card nickel packs to 5-card nickel packs.

The Topps website references 6-card nickel packs for the 1952 set in their 75-year history article (1938-2013): http://www.topps.com/corporate/history 

Also, many of the articles on PSAcard.com reference 6-card nickel packs during the '50s, which can be found with a quick google search.  \

I know the majority of the '60s nickel packs contained 5 cards because I can watch wax pack breaks dating back to 1963. 

The best summary I can find so far is located on the infamous Wikipedia site, which shows the change occuring between 1960-1961:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s_Topps 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_Topps

I'd rather have a better source than Wikipedia though.