1961 Topps Flocked Stickers

1961 Topps Flocked Stickers were inserts in packs of 1961 Topps football cards. (Topps referred to them cloth emblems; it was some highfalutin price guide that started calling them flocked stickers.) The base set includes 48 stickers: one for each of the 14 NFL and 8 AFL teams, an NFL logo and an AFL logo, and 24 stickers representing colleges. Like Topps's Metallic Sticker inserts from the year before, the stickers suffer from myriad quality problems: poor focus, ink bleed, poor centering, etc.

The NFL stickers and most of the college stickers appear to have been issued with first series 1961 Topps cards, because they are included on one of the first series checklists. I assume that the AFL stickers and the remaining three college stickers were issued in second series packs, but they do not appear on a checklist. The second series stickers are nicer than the first series stickers, in my opinion, because they use the actual AFL team logos.

Each of the team stickers came paired with a sticker containing a letter of the alphabet. Kids who bought the stickers could use these letters to spell their names. Each of the 12 second series stickers can be found paired with two different letters, making a total of 60 stickers in the master set. There are no letters "Q" or "X," so young collectors named Quincy and Xavier were out of luck.

The stickers are not numbered, so I used the numbering shown on the first series checklist and continued the pattern into the second series: pro teams first, then college teams.