The 1966 Topps baseball set was a spectacular set featuring beautiful full-color photography set against a minimal design that let the quality images do the talking, a trend that began with the 1961 issue and was gradually improved until it was perfected in 1967.  Featuring a host of Hall of Famers and superstars, the issue contains the rookie card of Jim Palmer.  

Presented here is an extremely attractive original owner complete set, assembled directly from packs in its year of issue and carefully stored away, eventually tucked into older-style nine-pocket pages.  Largely clean and sharp as "pack fresh" cards, the set does suffer from centering issues that are ubiquitous with mid-1960s Topps, but particularly prevalent here in the first 100 cards, which are almost universally centered low, though the cards are almost all sharp.  Centering improves as one progresses through the set, though there remain issues throughout.  As a result of the centering, along with a few examples where handling or other defects reduce the technical grade, the set grades out roughly 1% NM/MT, 5% NM, 20% EX/MT, 41% EX, 28% VG/EX, 4% VG, 1% GOOD, and a few lesser, with the aforementioned centering issues the primary flaw reducing the technical grades of the cards.  None of the set's major variations are included here.

We selected six of the issue's most important cards and submitted them to SGC for grading, during the time when PSA was not accepting submissions.  The results were as follows: #50 Mantle (SGC EX/MT+ 6.5), #100 Koufax (SGC EX+ 5.5), #126 Palmer (SGC NM 7), #300 Clemente (SGC EX 5), #365 Maris (SGC NM 7), #500 Aaron (SGC NM 7). A breakdown of the remaining key cards would be as follows:  #1 Mays (EX), 28 Niekro (EX/MT), 29 Rose (EX), 36 Hunter (EX), 70 Yastrzemski (EX/MT), 72 Perez (EX), 90 Aparicio (EX?MT), 110 Banks (EX), 120 Killebrew (EX/MT), 125 Brock (EX), 130 Torre (VG/EX), 132 Cepeda (EX), 160 Ford (EX/MT), 195 Morgan (EX), 200 Mathews (EX/MT, 210 Mazeroski (EX), 255 Stargell (EX/MT), 288 Sutton (EX/MT), 310 F. Robinson (EX), 320 Gibson (VG/EX), 390 B. Robinson (EX/MT), 410 Kaline (EX), 420 Marichal (EX), 430 Drysdale (EX/MT), 510 Wilhelm (EX/MT), 550 McCovey (EX), 580 Williams (EX/MT).    An extremely strong, sharp and colorful set.  598 cards total.