Story: Didn’t hang on to all of your Topps Star Wars trading cards from the 1970s? Fear not, they’re all in this book – every last one of them, front and back – along with “director’s commentary” discussing image selection, the relationship between Topps and Lucasfilm, the occasional gaffe, and more. Really, the only thing missing is the smell of bubble gum.
Review: I have never really been a card collector, but once upon a time in the 1990s, I realized that I had an entire box of Topps Star Wars trading cards that had defied the odds, survived many a purge of childhood personal belongings, and had moved out of the house with me. I decided it was time to treat this seriously, and purchased many, many pages of those clear, semi-flexible card holder pages that would fit in a three-ring binder, and started organizing the cards, trying to put them more or less in numerical order, and trying to get my head around how complete a collection I had, and what the value of it might be. As it turns out, I had a nearly-complete collection – my greatest deficiency was in the second wave of cards with red borders – and in very good shape. The binder was put on a shelf and kept moving with me, from Arkansas to Wisconsin and back again, though when I had kids, I decided perhaps it was time to start parting with some of that collection, because kids always need to eat, and these cards… well, they were just taking up shelf space and not really being appreciated. And when I discovered this book, parting with the cards became a lot easier.
And look, the book doesn’t replace the cards. If you’re a hardcore collector of trading cards, what I just wrote will sound like blasphemy to you, and I get that. I suspect that the reason I wound up with as many of the Topps Star Wars cards as I had was that they were a piece of Star Wars merch that was available almost immediately after the movie, when – unthinkably by modern standards – none of the other merch was ready to hit the stores. So I wound up with the cards. A lot of the cards. They went into one of my dad’s cast-off cigar boxes, where they stayed safe, dry, and un-messed-with, apparently for years. I got decent money for them when I started selling them at conventions, though not exactly being a seasoned card collector (and not really having the time to put into pricing a hundred or more cards individually), I probably could have gotten more. And in light of that, one thing that I’m glad this book isn’t …is a price/rarity guide. If that’s what you’re looking for here, you may be disappointed. If you just want reproductions of the cards themselves, front and back, in order, with supporting text aplenty discussing how certain images came to be used/captioned, and how the card line came to exist in the first place at a time when trading cards were seen almost exclusively as a sports-related item, this is definitely the book for you.
I gasped with appreciation when I reached the back of the book and saw that they had also reproduced the non-Topps cards that were originally included in loaves of Wonder Bread in 1977 – those, and an 8-track tape of the soundtrack, were truly my first pieces of Star Wars merchandise, and to be honest, I kind of liked the layout and design of the Wonder Bread cards better than those of the Topps cards. That “extra” range of cards is a very minor footnote that absolutely did not have to be included here…but I’m ecstatic that someone thought to include them anyway.
In summary: looking for a price/value/rarity guide? It’s not here. Just want to wallow in some warm 1977 nostalgia evocative of being in that first generation of Star Wars fandom? This is definitely your book. Later books in this series cover, naturally, the Empire and Jedi trading cards.
Year: November 17, 2015
Author: Gary Gerani
Publisher: Abrams
Pages: 550
