Simply Magical

This post is continuation, in a way, of the Penny Arcade series I toyed with several years back.  The premise is simple, I merely examine Topps one cent packs, preferably those already in my personal collection.  This brings us to a 3-for-1 deal today, as the "focus" (groan) is on some Magic Photo Packs.

The earliest card set put out by Topps debuted in 1948 and was successful enough to warrant a second series that came out in early 1949.  While the wrapper makes it seem like the set should be called Hocus Focus, that was actually the name of the bubble gum, while the cards got second billing as, of course, the self-developing Magic Photo. As an side, the cards came inserted between the inner and outer wraps. This surely impacted the condition of surviving examples today! You can find all sorts of prior posts I've written about the set using the Labels links. if interested.

There were two styles of penny packs used for the set, both with 1949 copyrights (and the same indicia). One has a glassine inner wrap around the gum, the other foil. I'm not sure if the yellow glassine used here was the only color used though but I've not seen another, although X-Ray Roundup employed a dark green inner wrap in 1949.

Here's the yellow:

The foil pack may have come after the glassine, I'm not really sure and the fact that two series were produced may or may not mean there's any connection:

This is the indicia; technically it's a Bubbles Inc. release: 

Note the Lord Baltimore Press logo (which appears on a couple of other similar stye wrappers into some part of 1949) and also the black stamped letters and numbers.  Here:

I'm not 100% sure what that all means and every other example I've seen of the opened wrappers does not feature this. However, at a guess it's a stock identifier at the start of the paper used to print the wrappers where 10 indicates the size, MC stands for Multi Color and 32' is the length of the spooled roll.

Here's a point of sale banner for the first series, once offered by REA as part of a larger lot of related sales materials:

I can't find a color image of the first series retail box, but the Topps sell sheet, sent to me in this case by BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd, sure has a nice b&w image of it:

Compare this to the second series box in 1949, which came from another REA auction some time ago.:

It sure looks like both series were co-mingled for 1949 as there's 126 subjects in each.  Worth noting, this is the first Topps one-cent release to feature a square retail box and not be sold out of a round canister. I suspect they were reconfiguring things for the debut of Bazooka penny packs a little later in '49.  It's hard to read but the front panel says "Bubble Gum in Colors" at the bottom right. Six different colors of gum were manufactured, so that's kind of a sly move as the kiddies may have thought the images would be in color once developed. 

1955 saw Topps re-release a couple of sets in a cost cutting move as they moved in on acquiring Bowman.  One was Hocus Focus, issued in one and five cent configurations, the latter in a slightly larger card dimension than the former and with thirty less subjects.  Once again, use the Labels for more on the 1955 set, which clearly states "Hocus Focus" on the back of each card, unlike the 1948-49's. At this point in their history, Topps had stopped giving a set's bubble gum one brand name and the cards another.

The penny pack in 1955 had a white inner wrap:

These one cent 1955 packs are exceedingly difficult to find and the smaller series of 126 cards are quite tough as well (not that the cards from the series of 96 are easy). This would be the last issue from Topps that inserted a card between the two wrappers.

Yup, also Bubbles, Inc., which was originally used by Topps to create some space between their products but soon after this became their go-to persona for potentially controversial sets. It's use here was more of a throwback I think.