1991 Topps Baseball Forum

Basically my whole collection of 1991 topps is the glow back variation. I am wondering how to add that as it is not an insert set or parallel.

Thanks!

I believe if added, it would be as a parallel set (we would also have to add a UV glow back dark logo parallel set) 

Before adding this, please check with Admin.

Only if you can scan them while glowing.. 

Actually, they make dual-lamp scanners, UV and Visible light, to capture images of materials only detectable under UV light.

http://www.chemeurope.com/en/products/101237/chromimage-scanner-uv-visible-ar2i-tlc.html

So, I guess if we create "glow" parallels, only UV scans would be acceptable.

Bounty13 wrote:

Only if you can scan them while glowing.. 

The checklist already exists, but it's called "Dark Topps Logo Variation" as they backs appear darker when not under a UV light.

I'm not so sure about that.  I think there are more variations than what are reflected currently in the database.

Credit: https://www.beckett.com/forums/thread-1578571.html

The 1991 O-Pee-Chee (base version, not Premium) and Bowman baseball sets also has glow backs

So where did we land with the "Glow" in UV/blacklight parallel? I can actually see the difference without a blacklight. The "non-glow" cards have a dark red border and logo on the back, but the "glow" cards have a more orange-colored border and fainter logo. While sorting through a couple thousand new additions of these cards, I noticed the difference as I was pulling out the VERY obvious Dark Logo cards. Using a blacklight confirmed what I thought I was seeing. I can show a picture of 5 copies of card # 36 Donnie Hill taken under a blacklight. One was a known Dark logo, 2 glowed and 2 didn't glow.

The middle one is the Dark Logo Back version. The 2 on the left are glowing and the 2 on the right are not. The blacklight was at the bottom of this picture.

EDIT: I can also confirm that the All-Star cards have a glow version too. I have one regular and one glowback of #398 Ryne Sandberg AS.

So, with a black light in hand, I thought I would see the scarcity of these cards.  To begin, I have a decent sample size in that I now have 7 (minus 1 card - explained later) complete sets (1 being still a factory set though opened) and about another 8000 in my duplicates boxes for trade.  For each and every card I have a minimum of 6 cards and as many as 30 cards. This does not count the Dark Logo VAR parallel which I may go through today as they also exist in glow back and regular back.

Neither version are rare.  I now have a complete set of regular back and a complete set of glow back. If anything, the regular back is rarer than the glow back. For many cards, I only have 1 regular back while having 10 or more glow back.  2 cards I actually had to dig into the factory set (last resort) to find the regular back so of those, I defintiely only have the one regular back.  Only one card did I have to also find in the factory set to find the glow back; I did not have more than 10 of that particular card.

Factory sets are not one version or another.  They are a mix of both regular and glow back. My particular set has more glow backs than regular back.

I used to have only 6 complete sets and when I went looking for a #629 card to add to the set I was building, I did not find any in my duplicates.  That is when I remembered that it was the last card I acquired for the last set I completed (I believe from a trade here on TCDB) and realized I was now again missing that card to complete another set. Why do I want 7 sets? Because I hate things that are "almost but never complete". So now I have it on my Want List; if one of my regular trade partners has it for trade, I would be happy to have it included in our next trade.  It does not have to be regular or glow back as it is going into a set that is a mix. No worries about completing an 8 set as there is another card where I had only 1 duplicate which is now in the 7th incomplete set.

My recommendation is that this VAR parallel not be added to this site's database. Unless someone has a black light, he would not know if he owns one version or another.  This would really complicate potential trades (and could cause some disagreements) as a trader may not know which version he actually has while the person in need may want one particular version.  If someone is looking to complete on eof these parallel sets, I can definitely help on at least 80% of the cards, more so on the glow backs than the regular issue.