Thursday, March 6, 2008

Porcelain 1980 Topps Rookie Card

The R&N China Company must have had a deal with Topps in the early 1990's to reproduce classic rookie cards in a variety of interesting ways. In one of my earlier posts was a coffee mug featuring Rickey's rookie card on the front.

Today's post is of a porcelain version of that same classic card (1980 Topps #482), advertised as the "world's thinnest porcelain baseball card." This is probably a pretty safe assumption, as I don't know of too many different types of porcelain baseball cards out there.




This porcelain card is about the same size as an actual baseball card, but with rounded corners, and comes complete with a "solid wood display base." It was probably produced around the same time as the coffee mug (1992), although I'm not actually sure. At the bottom of the porcelain, below the picture of the actual card, it says "R&N China Co, 'Sports Nostalgia,' Carrolton, Ohio." The back of the card looks just like the back of his normal rookie card, but is numbered in gold lettering (my card is limited edition #1,114, out of who know how many).



The card came packaged in a corrugated cardboard sleeve, with the card placed in the middle. Luckily it has stood up to its "thin yet very durable" claim, as the packaging didn't provide much protection for a piece of porcelain.



On the back of the package is the certificate of authenticity, also numbered to 1,114. It says that the card is an officially certified edition, limited to only 30 firing days. Which, really doesn't say too much about how many of them there actually are out there. Either way, I enjoy the graphic that accompanies the certificate.

3 comments:

Jason Presley said...

I just picked up the porcelain Winfield rookie card they made, but it didn't come with the packaging or the wood stand, and the spot on teh back for the "limited edition #" is blank. I'm betting the guy with the gold pen just got tired.

According to the 2003 Standard Catalog the entire 1993 Topps set was reproduced in porcelain by R&N China, with the multiples of 5 (usually reserved for stars) produced in quantities of 5000 and all the rest in 1000 each. There was also a series of 1993 Topps porcelain magnets.

Over on The Bench, we were talking about them a bit and there is much doubt that the entire 825 card 1993 Topps set was actually produced or if they eventually only produced the cards to order. While there are a smattering of commons to be found on eBay, if there were really 1000 each of these, you'd think the Jeter draft pick cards would be moving quite often. I've seen the Dave Henderson, but I have to wonder if the cards of Meulens or Roberto Kelly were actually made.

Unknown said...

So how much is Dave Winfield rookie porciline card worth

Anonymous said...

I have Ricky Henderson porcelain card #91285,the package film did not hold.seems like 30days of firing yielded lots of cards