Although this will settle the Bob Nemcek questions on the Minor League Thread.
Occasionally Topps will throw in the packet (often simply a legal envelope cut in half) in which one of its Vault images was stored in the photo archives. Happened to me twice this week and I thought I'd give you an idea of how those archives and their two million (plus) images were stored. Each packet would be in a green hanging folder. Some players had just one packet. Others, like, say, Bob Miller, might have 30 or 40 because of all the trades and such.
The yellow one dates to 1966 and the work of the famed traveling photographer Jim Laughead (
Untitled Document), and the 1972 one bears the printing of Bill Haber, the pioneering collector and late sports editor who had just begun to work at Topps the year before and was there well into the '80s before his unfortunate and premature death due to asthma in the early '90s.
Postscript - the stamp listing the contents and quality dates back at least to 1959. Topps had custom-made envelopes before, then presumably had a cost-benefit eureka moment that ordinary envelopes and a $5 stamp set-up would cost a lot less. Also in the categories of images you'll notice "No Hat" - confirmation of the intention to be prepared for trades and the like - and the use of the word "Action" which obviously means exactly the opposite of what we'd think today. Not game action but poses
simulating action.