Somewhere in the great beyond, Sy Berger must be smiling. When he and graphic artist Woody Gelman gathered at the kitchen table of Berger’s Brooklyn apartment in the autumn of 1951 — just weeks after Bobby Thomson smacked his pennant-winning “Shot Heard ’Round the World” — they weren’t thinking about creating works of art.
They merely were trying to design a set of cards that would encourage kids to chew more Topps bubble gum.
“The ironic thing is that it wasn’t supposed to be about the cards,’’ Berger told me several years before his death in 2014. “Back then, Topps was in the business of selling gum and they thought if we put a bunch of cards in a package with a stick of gum, it would boost sales. Never in a million years did any of us think that baseball card collecting would become such a big part of popular American culture. But it did. And Topps quickly adjusted their focus. The cards became the thing.”
Did they ever.
In addition to convincing kids across America to take up collecting, that gorgeously designed 1952 Topps set eventually
