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