The blue lines say the card is real. They don't say it came first.

What the lines are

On some 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookies, the back carries thin light-blue lines that are not part of the design. They are easy to miss in a small photograph and obvious under a lamp.

They appear only on the O-Pee-Chee printing. The Topps version of the same card does not have them.

Beyond that, the descriptions start to drift. One guide calls them two fine lines running vertically down the whole back. Another describes light-blue stripes going across it. A third describes blue skate lines under the cartoon hockey player. That alone should make a buyer cautious: a feature this widely discussed is not even described the same way twice.

What sellers say they mean

The story you will most often read is that O-Pee-Chee printed the card in two runs, that only the first carried the blue lines, and that the lined cards are therefore the earlier, rarer and better ones.

Some popular guides repeat it as fact. Some dealers go further and recommend buying only lined copies. Plenty of listings put the words "blue print lines" in the title, because buyers search for them.

What is actually known

Very little.

No one who worked at O-Pee-Chee has ever publicly confirmed the first-print story, and neither has Upper Deck, which owns the O-Pee-Chee name today. One long-time collector of the card puts it plainly on his own site: whether the lines mark a first print run is neither confirmed nor denied by anyone in a position to know, so everyone is still guessing.

There is no surviving production record that we or anyone else has cited showing how many runs there were, in what order, or which plates or rollers were used for each.

The better explanation

The most useful observation came from collectors comparing scans rather than repeating guides.

In a long discussion on the Collectors Universe forums, one of them noticed that the lines do not belong to the Gretzky card alone. They run straight down the whole column of the printed sheet that contains it, so the other cards printed in the same column carry them too.

The same discussion turned the usual story on its head. If the lines came from damage, they may as easily have appeared partway through the run as at its start. Nobody can prove the order either way, and that is the point.

What the lines are good for

They are still useful, just not in the way the listings suggest.

They are a sign of an authentic card. Guides to spotting counterfeits note that fakes have generally not reproduced the lines. That is a genuine reason to be pleased to find them, with one caution from our own guide to spotting a fake 1979 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky: once a tell becomes famous, it becomes the first thing a forger copies. We saw exactly that happen with the yellow dot on his shoulder.

Their absence proves nothing. Plenty of genuine O-Pee-Chee rookies have no lines at all. A clean back is not a warning sign.

And they do not make a card earlier, rarer or better. That claim has never been shown. Paying extra for it means paying for a story.

What to check if a listing mentions them

Ask for a clear photograph of the back. Lines that are "visible in hand" and invisible in every photo should not carry a premium.

Judge the card on what can be measured. Centring, corners, surface and the grade on the label decide its value. Our piece on why O-Pee-Chee cards come off the sheet the way they do covers what actually varies from copy to copy.

Treat "first print" as a selling phrase. If a seller uses it to justify a higher price, it is fair to ask what evidence they have. The honest answer is that nobody has any.