El Cardquistador

I’ve always been skeptical of the “piano wire” claim regarding how O-Pee-Chee (OPC) cut their cards. It wasn’t a desire to be contrarian; it simply didn’t pass the physics test.

Think about the mechanics: for a wire to slice through stacks of industrial cardboard, it would need to be thin enough to cut cleanly, yet strong enough to hold extreme tension without snapping. Even a .008″ guitar string—one of the thinnest wires most of us handle—won’t cut your finger no matter how hard you press. Actual piano wire starts at roughly .030″ because it’s designed to survive being struck by hammers. At that thickness, you aren’t cutting cardboard; you’re crushing it.

But whenever I raised these questions in collecting circles, I didn’t get explanations. I got anger. The response was usually a variation of “Everyone knows this,” “It’s common knowledge,” or my personal favorite: the indignant “What do you mean, source? I’m the source. I’m an expert.”

That’s not how knowledge works. That’s how mythology calcifies. The more defensive people became, the more convinced I became that nobody actually knew—they were just repeating a story they’d been told.

The Mystery Solved

The mystery was finally unraveled on a Collectors.com thread, where the legend was dismantled by primary testimony. Michael Elie, who worked at O-Pee-Chee starting in March 1972, explained the real process. He worked on the Roland 63-inch press (a 4-plate process: Yellow/Magenta/Black/Cyan) at the London, Ontario plant. The sheets were then sent to the facility on Adelaide Street to be “cut by rotary discs.”

When asked to elaborate, Elie clarified: “Think seven spinning discs with sheets being fed underneath them. One sheet cut into eight strips of cardboard.”

This makes complete sense. It’s a standard industrial method. The “variation in centering” OPC is famous for? That’s the result of sheets shifting slightly as they were fed through the rotary cutter. The signature rough edges? Those come from rotary blades that weren’t maintained with the same precision as Topps’, combined with the fact that cards were secondary to the company’s candy business.

The Birth of a Legend

So where did the piano wire myth come from? It likely filled a void. OPC cards looked and felt different; they had a “fuzzy” edge that Topps lacked. Collectors needed an explanation, and in the absence of documentation or factory tours, someone offered a technical-sounding one. It sounded specific. It sounded like “insider” knowledge. And eventually, questioning it became a sign that you weren’t “serious” enough to be in the inner circle.

The irony is that the truth—rotary disc cutters—is far less exotic than the myth. But it has the one thing the piano wire story never had: it came from someone who was actually in the room.

The “10% Print Run” Question

Which brings me to my other lingering O-Pee-Chee question: the claim that OPC printed “10% of what Topps printed”—or sometimes “10–20%,” depending on who you ask.

Not 8%. Not 12%. Not a variable range based on the year. Exactly 10% or 10–20%.

Where do these numbers come from? The more I consider the economics of the 1970s, the less sense a fixed percentage makes. Both companies were confectionery firms first. As noted on Wikipedia and by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the American giant was founded in 1938 as Topps Chewing Gum, Inc. Their early business was built on Bazooka bubble gum; baseball cards were simply an experimental marketing premium introduced in 1951 to increase candy sales.

Similarly, O-Pee-Chee was a Canadian confectionery company founded in 1911. For both firms, the cards weren’t “investment assets”—they were high-end wrapper premiums designed to move sugar through corner stores and drug shops.

The demand in Canada wasn’t a perfect mirror of the U.S. In Canada, hockey was the first-class citizen. Baseball was secondary at best. This affected everything: how many stores ordered stock, how many packs actually sold through, and how many cards were preserved versus tossed in the trash.

Furthermore, we don’t actually know what Topps’ print runs were. This wasn’t a manufacturer with production logs and serial numbers available to the public. These were disposable products for children.

So how did we arrive at “10%” or “10–20%”? My suspicion is that it’s the “Piano Wire” of data. Someone made an estimate—likely based on the fact that Canada’s population is roughly 10% of the U.S. population—and it sounded credible enough to stick. In the absence of actual data from either company, an educated guess was repeated until it became a “fact.”

The Reality of the Hobby

Sometimes the boring answer is the right answer. In any collecting hobby, when primary sources are scarce, we accept conjecture because “something” feels better than “nothing.” But as the testimony of people like Michael Elie proves, the story is often more important to the collectors than the truth. Sometimes, “I don’t know” is a much more honest position than a confident lie.

To believe the “10% Rule,” you have to believe that Canadians ate exactly 1/10th the amount of gum as Americans, regardless of the sport on the card or the year in question. It’s an oversimplification that makes for a great sales pitch at a card show, but a terrible historical record. Truth is usually messier than the stories we tell ourselves.