Card of the Day - 2023-11-22

top sellers superstars
Panini / Top Sellers [trade : UK] "Superstars" (1975) 57/100 - TNX-12

Here we have The Wombles, who were great, they were green ages before most people even thought of being so, ecologically-friendlily tidying up their surroundings, including of things that the other folk left behind, and also teaching us geography by osmosis because most of them were named after a place, so we started with Great Uncle Bulgaria, Orinoco, Tobermory, Tomsk, and Wellington, and more joined through the years. You can see a whole list of the names at TidyBag/Wombles.

This is a very unusual set, a mixture of sport, music, cinema and television and there are five football cards included. To find out who they were, and also to see the whole line up, which is very impressive indeed, just head over to the Football Cartophilic Exchange/TSS 

It is only listed in our vintage British Trade Index part III, under Top Sellers Ltd, and they are described as being from London and Leicester; however the header continues to say that they were "Associated with Edizioni Panini of Italy. Cards in  packets, and albums, sold at newsagents and shops in the 1970s, The set is described as : "Superstars. 135 x 95. Inscribed "Top Sellers Ltd. 1975", Nd. (100)"

Now this appears to be the only truly cartophilic card that The Wombles appear on ? Unless you know different. But they did appear on a card game, produced by Whitman in 1976, in which you had eight cards showing Wombles, and the rest of the cards showing the things that the other folk left behind. The idea was that if you saw two of the same piece of rubbish on the table you could grab them, and that was how you eventually won. You can see some of the other games at TheWorldOfPlayingCards/Whitman, but oddly The Wombles one is not there. This is even odder because Whitman made Womble jigsaws and board games as well.