Sy Berger joined Topps in 1952 and produced their first set of baseball cards which he designed at his kitchen table using cardboard and scissors. Packs of this edition came with six cards and piece of gum and sold for 5 cents.
One of those cards was a Mickey Mantle rookie card, but even with that, it didn't sell well at all. The set was overproduced, especially the second part of it. There were a whole lot that did not sell and Berger tried to unload them by going around to carnivals and selling them for a penny each and eventually, in desperation, ten for a penny.
By 1960, he still had a huge number of the 1952 set so he eventually commissioned a barge to carry three garbage truck loads of the '52s out to the Atlantic Ocean where they were dumped.
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