1973 Calbee Book

There was a discussion between Sean and Ryan Laughton a little while back in which I learned that there was a book on the 1973 Calbee set available on Yahoo! Japan Auctions.  I found the book for sale on Amazon's Japanese website and ordered a copy for myself (my copy was roughly $25 plus about $12.50 for shipping).  It took about a month to arrive but it was well worth the wait.

It's a hard back book that was published in 2001 and is about 7 1/2 inches by 5 inches.  Inside it shows the front of every Calbee card from the 1973/74 set - all 368 cards (note that the first 91 cards in the 1973/74 set have identical fronts to the 1973 set).  The book also shows the text from the back of the card (the text on the first 91 cards appears to be the same in both the 1973 and 1973/74 sets but the design of the backs is different).

I could show all the pages in this book and it wouldn't do it justice so I'll just share a couple to give you the idea:

pp 44-45 - Morimichi Takagi (#71), Yukiharu Shibuya (#72), Koichi Tabuchi (#73), Takenori Emoto (#74), Katsuya Nomura (#75), Taira Fujita (#76)

pp 90-91 - Mikio Sendo (#209), Wally Yonamine (#210 & #211), Morimichi Takagi (#212 & #213), Tatsuhiko Kimata (#214)

While the 1973/74 set is the only baseball set that has every card featured, there's also a gallery of ephemera from all the Calbee sets from the 1970's - chip bags, wrappers, albums and some items that I'm not quite sure what are:

pp 8-9

The book also contains checklists for the all the Calbee sets from 1973-80.  I'm pretty sure it's the source that Gary Engel used for his checklists for the 1977-79 Calbee sets in the most recent version of his price guide.

There is another set that the book shows all the card fronts as well as the text from the back but it's not a baseball card set.  It turns out that Calbee did a 36 card sumo set in 1973:

pp 156-157

It's a great little book and thanks to Sean and Ryan for letting me know it existed!