Uncut Sheet of 1956 Topps Football Cards

The picture below shows what I believe is the configuration of an uncut half-sheet of 1956 Topps football cards. If you hold your cursor over a card in the virtual sheet, your browser should show you the number of the card and the name of the player. Clicking on a card will bring up the full-sized scan. (A real uncut sheet would not have lines between the cards--that's an effect of scanning them individually.)

To get the sheet below, I started with a picture of a partial sheet that appeared in an online auction. That gave me the top six rows of the half-sheet. I then made the following observations and assumptions:

• I assumed that the half-sheet was 11 rows by 10 columns, like a 1956 Topps baseball half-sheet, but turned on end.
• I noted that the cards in each row of the partial sheet were all from the same team: nine players and a team card.
• I noticed that the rows on the partial sheet were in reverse alphabetical order by the team's city: San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and Green Bay. Following that pattern, the remaining rows of the sheet would be Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago Cardinals, Chicago Bears, and Baltimore. This is also the order in which the players appear on the set's unnumbered checklist.
• I saw that the players in each row were ordered alphabetically by last name, and that, from row to row, the team card alternated between the left end and the right end.

Following these patterns, I added five rows to the partial sheet to get this configuration for the half-sheet:

This is how the cards in the half-sheet would have been numbered:

One team, the Washington Redskins, is missing from the half-sheet above. According to the price guides, the Redskins and Cardinals cards in this set are short prints, so I presume that the other half-sheet contained a row of Redskins instead of a row of Cardinals. PSA's population report indicates that the Redskins cards are especially scarce in high grade, so my guess is that they were on either the top or the bottom of the sheet. Dale Atkeson is the toughest card in the set, so he would have been on the left end of the row, on the corner of the sheet. The Redskins team card would have been on the right end.

I'm not certain what the order of the rows would have been on the other half-sheet. I suspect that the row of Cardinals was simply omitted, but that would have put the Bears and Browns team cards next to each other, which breaks from the pattern on this half-sheet.

For general information on uncut sheets of vintage football cards, see my blog article, U is for Uncut Sheets. Also see my other virtual uncut sheets, listed in the left column of this page.