Gum and Wax Stains on 1977 Star Wars Cards: What the Pack Did to What Was Inside It

Every pack of 1977 Topps Star Wars cost fifteen cents and held seven cards, one sticker and a stick of bubble gum, sealed in waxed paper. Two of those things were there to protect and sell the rest. Both of them left marks that collectors are still paying for nearly fifty years later.

Most people blame the gum. The gum is only half the story, and usually not the half that hurts the cards.

How a pack was put together

All five series of the 1977 set were sold the same way: seven cards and a sticker in a wax pack, with a piece of gum inside.

A dealer who has opened a great many of them described the arrangement to PSA. The cards went into the pack with the front card against the back of the wrapper. The gum went against the front of the pack, and usually sat on the back of the sticker.

That arrangement decided which object got which stain.

The gum went on the sticker

Because the gum normally sat against the sticker, it is the stickers that carry most of the gum damage from these packs, usually as residue on the back.

Collectors who open old packs report it again and again: the stickers come out with varying amounts of gum residue. The sticker was the gum's neighbour, in every pack, for as long as the pack stayed sealed.

The wax went on a card

The cards had a different enemy. The packs were sealed by heat, which softened the wax coating on the wrapper, and the card sitting against that seal could come away with wax printed onto its front.

The same dealer put it simply: one card in a pack was likely to have a wax stain, and in his day you would toss that card and be left with six cards and a sticker. Anyone opening an old pack today should expect the same.

Gum could still reach a card, through heat, damp or a card shifting in the pack over the years, and plenty of 1977 cards have a gum stain on the back. But by design, the gum's target was the sticker and the wrapper's target was a card.

What PSA does with a stain

PSA grades the card's physical condition first and then, where a stain from something packaged with the card holds it back, it can add the qualifier ST for staining. A beautiful card with a visible wax or gum stain might come back as an 8 (ST) rather than a straight 8. There is no 10 (ST): a stained card is not a perfect card.

Submitters can ask PSA not to use qualifiers, in which case the stain simply lowers the number.

The market treats a qualified card roughly as it treats a card two grades lower, though that is a rule of thumb rather than a law. On our sister site we measured what each PSA qualifier actually costs on matched pairs of the same card in the same grade, in what a PSA qualifier actually costs.

Can you remove it?

This is where the rules pull in two directions, and both are PSA's own.

PSA's glossary says that a wax stain on the front of a card can be removed, because the front has a protective coating, but that wax on the back is permanent, because the bare cardboard absorbs it.

PSA's grading standards also list, as evidence of cleaning, using a solution to remove wax, candy, gum or tobacco stains. A card showing evidence of cleaning does not get a numerical grade at all.

So a front wax stain may be physically removable, and collectors have argued for years about whether gently wiping off surface wax counts as alteration. Chemically cleaning a stain, though, is exactly what the graders are looking for, and the penalty for being caught is far worse than the stain. The safe course is to leave stains alone and let the grade reflect them.

How to spot one before you buy

Turn the card over. Gum stains usually show on the back as a discoloured patch. On the yellow 1977 backs they can be hard to see in a small photo.

Tilt the front. Wax on the front shows as a dull patch or streak when the card is angled against the light, and a scan taken flat can hide it entirely.

Ask for the back. Any listing for a raw 1977 card without a photograph of the reverse is hiding the side where most stains live.

Read the label. On a graded card, ST tells you a stain was there when PSA looked. Its absence tells you the stain, if any, was not enough to qualify the grade, not that the card is spotless.

Why it stopped

Topps stopped putting gum in its baseball packs in 1991, which collectors largely welcomed because it ended gum stains, and the next year it dropped waxed paper wrappers for plastic, which ended wax stains on the top and bottom cards. By then the cards, not the gum, had long been the point.

Some 1977 Star Wars packs had already gone without: Topps issued a gumless first-series pack for the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The thing worth sitting with

The gum was there to sell the cards, and the wax was there to keep them fresh. One stained the sticker and the other stained a card, in pack after pack, because of where each was put on the production line in 1977.

Nearly half a century later, a stain from a fifteen-cent pack is one of the main reasons a card that is otherwise perfect is not graded as one.

This index tracks the 1977 Topps Star Wars cards and stickers grade by grade, including the qualified grades. There is more on the set in how many perfect 1977 Star Wars cards exist and the PSA 10 that does not exist, and you can read how we work the numbers out.

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