In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Topps’ original baseball card sets were printed by various printers located in Brooklyn, New York where the Topps headquarters was based at the time. Some of the earliest Topps cards from 1938-1948 were printed by the Ideal Novelty & Card Company and Schumin Web Offset located in Brooklyn. These printers helped Topps launch its baseball card business and early sets featured simple designs printed using basic lithographic techniques.
As Topps grew in popularity and production volume increased through the 1950s, they expanded printing operations to other cities while also upgrading equipment and techniques. In the 1950s, Topps began using multiple printers around the country to meet rising demand, including Art Printing Company in Cleveland, Ohio and Piedmont Printing Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was during this decade that Topps also began using four-color process printing to introduce colorful photographs on its cards for the first time, moving beyond simpler spot color designs of earlier years.
In the 1960s, Topps consolidated more of its printing to larger commercial printers with state-of-the-art multi-color lithographic capabilities. Some of the major printers that produced Topps baseball cards in this decade included Bowen Press in Philadelphia, Nolan Printing Company in Seattle, and Campbell Printing Company in San Jose, California. These printers helped Topps achieve photographic quality and consistent multi-color reproduction needed for the detailed player images and colorful card designs of the 1960s.
As the 1970s arrived, Topps was producing billions of baseball cards annually and its printing operations grew enormously. The company was using over a dozen different printers across the United States to meet mass production demands. Some of the largest printers for Topps in the 1970s included American Banknote Company in New York City, Dart Container Corporation in Mason, Michigan, and Exhibitors Poster Exchange in Indianapolis. These mega printing plants were able to produce Topps baseball cards on an industrial scale.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as competition increased from Fleer and later Upper Deck, Topps further upgraded printing techniques and partnered with the most advanced commercial printers. Major printers producing Topps baseball cards in this period included Canadian Bank Note Company in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and American Printing Company in Lakeland, Florida. These printers helped Topps adopt the latest multi-color offset lithographic and photographic reproduction to achieve sharper card images than ever before.
Since the 2000s, Topps has consolidated most of its baseball card printing to just a few specialized printers with enormous capacities. The largest printers currently producing the majority of Topps baseball cards are Canadian Bank Note Company, Press Ganey Associates in South Bend, Indiana, and Phoenix Color Corporation in Hampshire, Illinois. These state-of-the-art printing facilities employ sophisticated 10-12 color offset lithography, foil stamping, and digital techniques to ensure quality and consistency across billions of Topps baseball cards printed annually in massive runs.
Over the past 80+ years Topps has utilized dozens of commercial printers across North America to produce its famous baseball card sets. As technology advanced, Topps consolidated more printing to larger specialized plants capable of meeting increasing high volume demands through industrial scale production. Today just a handful of the most advanced commercial printers in the United States and Canada produce the vast majority of annually released Topps baseball cards to distribute worldwide. Topps continues improving reproduction quality while maintaining precise historical standards through these leading printing partners.
