Calbee 50th Anniversary Book

I feel like 2022 has been a very disappointing year for Calbee.  Each of their three Series for the year have been pretty lackluster and they really didn't do anything all that interesting to celebrate their 50th Anniversary - basically similar reprint cards to what they did in 2002 and 2012, only this time they're insert cards with a kira finish.  And it doesn't look like there's going to be a Samurai Japan set this year either.  I was hoping that this new publication, the "Calbee Pro Baseball Card 50th Anniversary Book", would break this cycle but unfortunately it's another disappointment.

The mook (magazine/book) is about 100 pages long and was published by the publishers of the magazine GetNavi.  It starts off with three interviews.  The first interview is with Takeshi Mitsui who is currently in charge of Calbee's baseball cards and the second is with Shurinbu Ikeda who was in charge of them in the 90's - I'm using Google Translate for their names and occupations so I very well could have them wrong.  The last interview is with two guys from a group called the Afro Monkeys - I have no idea who they are or why they are talking about baseball cards.  As you'd expect, all three interviews are in Japanese so I don't really know how interesting they are and this is really not something I can complain about either.  Here's photos of the interviews:

The next section of the mook is devoted to Calbee's 50 years of cards broken down by decades.  This is a 30 page section that shows the fronts and backs of 96 cards from 1973 to the present which is less than two cards per year.  Well, actually it would be two cards per year except some years (1978, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1992, 2001, 2009, 2014, 2020 & 2021) aren't included in the section.  I'm really not sure why they didn't show more cards - they certainly could have skipped the page long "decade highlights" for each decade that list historic events in Japan for each decade.  There's a couple images of old chip bag wrappers and card albums that are interesting but it'd be nice if there were more of them.  Here's some random pages from this section:

There's a two page spread that appears to be dedicated to Mint Yokohama at their new location in the Marui City Yokohama shopping mall.  I think there's an implication that this is a great store to buy old Calbee at.  The page after the two page spread is a list of all the Mint stores so essentially it's a three page ad for Mint.  Here's the two pages for Mint Yokohama:

The final section of the mook are checklists for all the Calbee "flagship" cards from 1973 to 2022.  At 54 pages, this takes up over half of the entire publication.  It's all text - there's no pictures of cards or anything.  They do tackle the "difficult" years of 1977, 1978 and 1979 instead of ignoring them like Sports Card Magazine used to although the 1978 listing isn't as complete as it is in Engel (it looks like they're using the same checklist that was in the "1973 Calbee" book).  I want to stress that these are only the "flagship" sets - the Samurai Japan sets from 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020 aren't listed and neither is the "All Stars" set from 2016.  This section seems like a bit of overkill, especially given that the checklists from 1998 to the present are all available on Calbee's web site,   Here's a sample:

The magazine includes a baseball card but instead of being for an actual player, it's part of a series of four cards that GetNavi has done to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the baseball manga "Dokaben".  The included card is for the character Kazuto Tonoma:

There's also a full page ad that shows all four cards and identifies the GetNavi issues that had the other three cards:

I ordered this mook from Amazon Japan (using the link above) and with shipping it ran me about $27.  My initial thoughts when it arrived on Halloween was that it wasn't that great but I didn't regret buying it.  Upon further review I have revised my opinion - "regret" may not be the right word to use but if I knew when I ordered it what I know now, I probably wouldn't have bought it.