The Wrapper Outnumbered Every Card in the Set. Now It Is the Hard Part to Find.

Every pack of cards came in a wrapper. So when a set was new, there were more wrappers in the world than copies of any single card in it, roughly ten for every one. Then a child tore the pack open, kept the cards, chewed the gum and threw the wrapper at the bin. That is why, on the oldest sets this index covers, the wrapper is now one of the hardest pieces to find.

The arithmetic at the counter

A 1962 Mars Attacks pack cost five cents and held five cards from a set of 55. Any particular card, say number 36, turned up about once in every eleven packs. Each of those packs had a wrapper. So for every copy of card 36 that left the shop, about eleven wrappers left with it.

A 1977 Star Wars pack held seven cards and a sticker, from a series of 66 cards. Any particular card turned up about once in every nine and a half packs, so there were roughly nine or ten wrappers for every copy of it.

That assumes the packs were evenly mixed, which they never quite were. But the scale is right. We worked through the same arithmetic for the stickers in whether the 1977 stickers are really scarcer than the cards, and reached the same kind of answer: what was common in the pack and what is common now are two different things.

What happened next

The cards were the point. Children sorted them, swapped them, kept them in shoeboxes and rubber bands. The gum was eaten. The wrapper did its job in the few seconds it took to open the pack, and then it was rubbish.

Bob Swick, a long-time wrapper collector, told Sports Collectors Digest that a wrapper's usual fate was to be "wadded up and tossed." A Cardboard Connection history of Topps wrappers puts it more kindly: they left the printer as "a card cocoon," and they got no respect.

Wax paper did not help. It creased, tore and stuck to things. A wrapper that did survive was usually saved by accident, flattened in a drawer or left in a box of cards, and it carries the folds, tears and missing corners to show it. When Heritage sold a group of 1966 Batman packs and wrappers in 2012, both loose wrappers were described as having folds and portions missing. That is what an ordinary surviving wrapper looks like.

Mars Attacks: the hardest of all

The 1962 Mars Attacks set had a short and troubled life on sale. Topps first tested it through a front company, Bubbles Inc., under the name Attack From Space, and then pulled the cards from circulation after complaints about the violence. We covered that in the set mothers threw away and children hid.

Fewer packs were sold, so fewer wrappers existed to begin with. Then almost all of those were thrown away like any other wrapper. When PSA interviewed the leading Mars Attacks collectors for a Set Registry feature, one of them, who owned one of the best-graded sets anywhere, said he had never seen an unopened pack. Another said he owned a wrapper but had never seen a full pack either.

Think about what that means. The people who have spent years and a great deal of money building the finest Mars Attacks sets can find the cards. What they have not found is a pack the cards came in, still sealed in its wrapper.

The wrapper's status shows in a stranger way, too. When Renata Galasso reissued the set in 1984, the reissue added a 56th card that reprinted the wrapper design. The wrapper had become part of what collectors wanted from the set.

Star Wars: the exception that proves the rule

The 1977 Star Wars wrappers tell the opposite story. Each of the five series had its own wrapper, in its own colour, and they are not hard to find. They turn up in bundles.

The difference is when the set was made. By 1977 card collecting had adult collectors and dealers, and Star Wars was a craze from the start. It seems far more of everything was kept, the wrappers included. Topps itself later reproduced the five 1977 wrappers as metal prints, which says something about how the design is remembered, but nobody needed to reprint them as a card the way Galasso did for Mars Attacks.

So the rule is not that wrappers are always rare. It is that a wrapper survives only if someone decided to keep it, and before collecting wrappers was a hobby in itself, almost nobody did. Swick dated the real growth in wrapper collecting to the early 1990s, decades after the 1962 and 1966 wrappers had gone into the bin.

What to check before buying one

Expect damage, and price it in. Folds, tears and missing pieces are normal on a 1960s wrapper. A flat, complete one is the exception, and it is the one that commands real money.

Know the reprints. The 1984 Galasso card reprinted the Mars Attacks wrapper design, and modern art prints reproduce the 1977 Star Wars wrappers. Neither is a wrapper. Look for the wax paper, the folds of a real pack and the printing of the period.

Check the series. Star Wars wrappers changed colour with each series, and the 1966 Batman wrappers came in more than one design. Match the wrapper to the cards it claims to have held.

Treat a full pack with care. A sealed pack of a 1960s set is rarer still than a loose wrapper, and resealed packs exist. Heritage's own 2012 Batman lot flagged one pack as probably resealed. Buy sealed vintage packs graded, or from someone who will stand behind them.

The thing worth sitting with

On the day a 1962 Mars Attacks pack was opened, the wrapper was the most plentiful thing in it, with about eleven of them for every copy of any single card. Today some of the best collectors of that set say they have never seen one still sealed.

Scarcity in this hobby is rarely about how much was made. It is about what people chose to keep. The cards were kept because they were the reason for buying the pack. The wrapper was kept by almost nobody, and that is exactly why it is worth having now.

This index tracks the 1962 Mars Attacks, 1966 Batman and 1977 Star Wars cards grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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