1964 Wheaties album

I won an 80% complete 1964 Wheaties album from eBay. It was not cheap by my standards, coming out to about $1.50 a stamp, but these stamps are pretty rare (I didn't have any before this) and to get them in the album is even rarer. 

This appears to have been an album that was complete and that at some point someone literally cut out what I guess they thought were the ten best players in the book (and therefore, make up my want list):  Aaron, Clemente, Kaline, Killebrew, Marichal, Mays, McCovey, Robinson, Santo, Yastrzemski. Santo is the big headscratcher there, considering there are a lot of better players who (fortunately) were left in the book, like Snider, Spahn, Cepeda, Bunning, Torre, and Whitey Ford. Ford is one of six Yankees all of whom were still in the book. No Mantle, Banks, Koufax, Drysdale, Gibson, Frank Robinson, Billy Williams either. 

The stamps are magazine quality paper, using photographs that were surely sourced from Topps, as some of them are similar or the same as on Topps cards from the time. However, the photos do show up nicely compared to their cardboard counterparts, clearer and in better detail. The square layout shows more of the background which I like too.

Here's the cover.  

The book starts off with the history of the All Star Game. I'm not sure if this was an All Star Game related promotion or just an example of how big the midsummer classic was at this time.

The parks and their dimensions. This is a fun feature. They repeat Dodger Stadium for both leagues as the Angels were playing there at this time.

Here's the first page of stamps, with the typical layout of the pages.

I'm not going to show every page (there are a fair amount of simple headshots) but there are a lot of really great photos like these too. The Torre photo is the same as his 1962 rookie card. You can also see an example of where a star's stamp was cut out.

Was Luis Aparicio blonde? Or is it just a trick of the light? His 1963 Topps card is probably from the same shoot and his hair is darker there, so probably just a trick of the sunlight.

Not much to say here except some really nice background on these cards - Nelson Fox (not Nellie?) at Yankee Stadium; Woodeshick and Gilliam at the Polo Grounds.

Whitey Ford sighting! Even though the cutout makes it look like he's a Red Sox. Pretty sure all three of these photos have cardboard counterparts.

Tom Tresh was the Yankees' big rookie star who never quite panned out. I really like all the background activity on Malzone and Pearson's stamps.

Another bigtime Yankee in a great photo.

The back of the book has the averages of all the players included.

There is also a history of baseball. Three pages of a brief history, followed by a list of Hall of Fame players (87 at this point, with Luke Appling the most recent), and finally a list of the World Series and their results. The back cover is just the General Mills logo.