For those of you familiar with the 1977 Topps Star Wars card set. At the bottom of each card below the caption/title, there is either one star or two: "*" vs. "**" which I assume demarks different printing runs. Do most collectors care if they are mixed within a set, or would they prefer a full set of of one or the other. I want to know what priorities to use for putting sets together:
-frame centering
-focus/color
-one star or two?

Thank you

It denotes different sheets I believe, not "runs". Anyone have additional information?

Batman is correct. When I was heavy into Star Wars collecting I was always told that everyone thought they related to the print run but the small stars actually indicated whether the card was on the A or B side of the uncut sheet during the printing process. The small stars served as a guide to the printers.

As far as your other question I looked at frame centering and then focus/color. The stars did not make a difference to me.

I really don't have an opinion about the stars, but are you sure that every card in the set can be found with both one and two star versions? If Batman is correct about it being printing sheets, which sounds likely given the era, there might have been some duplication on different sheets, but not necessarily for every card. I don't have any, so I can't say.

But as to the other factors mentioned, centering, color, clarity, etc., well you're talking about the card condition or grade. Naturally you want to compile any set of the highest grade cards you can find. In vintage cards there were lots of products that were prone to having specific problems, like edge chipping or poor centering or uneven coloring, so the grading depends very much on the set. A gem mint may be practically impossible in some sets. That is not even counting the variable factors that you always have, like corner sharpness, surface wear or damage, gum staining and such.

So first you need to put together the set you want, either as a single purchase, or by lots, or one card at a time. Then you upgrade on an individual card basis, looking for the best overall grade to replace the cards that are in a lesser condition.

And if there is one thing that's always the most glaring defect in older cards I would have to say it's the centering. When a card has borders that don't match to the naked eye, whether it's top to bottom or side to side, that is something that can't not be noticed.

Great comments, everyone...thank you. Great info. That makes sense, About the 2 different print sides...not runs or "issues". And yes, I just finished putting together a full set of * cards and another with ** cards. So each of the 66 cards of a set can be either one star or two. It seems that the ** cards are better focused in general, not sure why.

I allways thought ( maybe wrongly ) that the stars denoted what was on the backs of the cards.

ie: one star was text, two stars was a piece of a puzzle picture.

There is a website, thestarwarstrilogy.com, that is displaying all 330 cards in the 5 original Star Wars 1977-78 series. They are the same design of 66 cards each, but have different color borders going down from blue, red, yellow, green through orange. They are showing a mix when it comes to the stars, although most seem to have only one.

No backs are shown and the meaning of the stars is not mentioned.

I found it interesting to discover how many of the cards shown are significantly off center. That looks like a really big problem for these sets in particular, especially since the colored borders stand out so much.

The other interesting thing is that, if they are correctly priced here, these cards remain quite cheap 38 years later. Topps must have really burned up the presses if you can still pick up a series in decent condition for around $30 today.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Raven,

I posted about this a while back when adding my cards to www.nonsportsrealm.com Originally had the cards listed as 1 set, but then broke it down to 1 star and 2 star sets (for all cards and stickers). I went back through my sets (for Star Wars, ESB, and ROTJ) to see which ones I had and if it was worth the time to go back and try to make sets of 1 star and 2 stars. I decided to just keep what I had

This message has been edited. Last edited by: AWR,

Many of the older Topps sets had the one- or two-star variants. For me, this was a feature to watch if I'd already completed my set but was feeling half-empty.

At one time I was chasing both variants (when available) for all of the Garbage Pail Kids series. The cards with puzzle-piece backs did not have the asterisks except on the one-of-nine that had the copyright notice, and in Series 6 I only saw * for the "a" cards and ** for the "b" cards; Series 12, 13, and 15 had only **. For some series a box might be dominated by one or the other, so I don't think that Topps expected that the print-sheet stars would be a target for collectors.

We did look for them some times, back in the Golden Age of card-trading!