Gummy, Gummy, Gummy

Well I am approaching my third month of quarantine and I have to tell you, seeing some MLB on TV or maybe the NHL playoffs would be real nice right about now.  Alas......

I thought this would just be a series of random images today but a bit of a gum theme developed, so I just went with it.

1949's Pixie Bubble Gum, which contained an X-Ray Roundup card (the gum and the cards were assigned different names early on by Topps before someone realized it was a stupid idea) and the red cello viewer needed to decipher the back.  I can't say I've seen a pack (emptied of the gum) offered with a viewer before but the card is also missing!

You could send away for a handheld viewer though, via this "waxy" insert found, in this case, in packs of Hopalong Cassidy:

Check out this other waxy insert from A&BC with Bazooka Joe offering a premium scarf of your favorite football club-fab!

Reminds me of similar 1967-68 inserts from the Topps Baseball and Football packs that advertised or promoted various things.  I tried to determine the date of this thinking it just listed First Division teams and a couple from the Scottish League but there was no correlation.  Seller just had it as being from the 70's.

After Topps tried to resurrect their Mini-Chiclets like Blockbuster gum in a bizarre reusable straw configuration they went with a new name, Gumniks, filled with the product in 1974. Or was it vice-versa?  Either way:

Here's another gum piece that Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins passed along a little while ago.  I can't find any information on it, does anyone out there know anything about it?

That's a very wholesome looking ad!

Stay safe out there folks!

(Update 5/23/20: Found a Grape Gumniks, in all its artificially flavored glory-I loved that flavor as a kid):

A Penny Here, A Nickel There

As we come up on the Fourth of July, which is perhaps my favorite holiday, I though I'd kick back today, practice my 12 oz. curls and just show a little eye candy representing items that are infrequently seen.

This is a box of some scarcity and it held 100 (maybe 120) tabs of Pixie Bubble Gum, each with an X-Ray Roundup card inserted between its wrapper layers. I can't swear I've seen another example of this box; this made an appearance on eBay a couple of months ago.

Dig the artwork:

They never missed a chance to get an advert in for Bazooka but as you can see here, were still making their original, Topps Gum in '49, although it would soon transition to a Chiclets style chew before going away completely in the early 50's. I think this box pre-dates the once-cent Bazooka tabs that were introduced in mid-1949:

Topps stopped including cards with their one cent gum tabs late in 1949 and I'm fairly certain they curtailed the postage stamp sized License Plates set accordingly and then reissued it in a larger size for 1950.  Flags of All Nations-Soldiers of The World also got this treatment as Topps transitioned so a larger card format. This format, measuring 1 3/4" x 2 7/8" was only used for these two sets. The 1949 Stop 'N Go wrapper (Topps named the cards and the gum separately back then) is tough, as is the 1950 version.

Bring 'Em Back Alive helped kick off off yet another, larger card size in 1950, one measuring  2 1/16" x 2 5/8" and which debuted with Hopalong Cassidy.

For some reason Topps used a date on their nickel packs but usually not their penny packs. That's a nice wrapper pardner!

This five-center is a lot more crinkly:

Any of those elongated five cent packs would have held panelized cards, a practice Topps ended by 1952. The practice of separately naming the gum and card set had disappeared by then as well.

This 'N That

It's been a while since i posted a miscellaneous thread with absolutely no focus or connecting material but I have to admit I'm hard pressed to find a topic this week given my post Thanksgiving torpor, so I'm just plumbing the depths of my hard drive. Sorry to be so lame but that's how it goes sometimes! Here's some stuff celebrating things not necessarily sold in a typical Topps retail pack:

Take a gander at a greeting card with a Hopalong Cassidy pack in it, pardner:

Freaking awesome, right?!

Here's some inserts that came in a typical Hoppy pack, or probably anything from Topps in 1950 (hey, I guess I did link something together):

Notice the little red spyglass that came with the "Wild West" cards?  Those were leftover X-Ray Roundup cards and you needed it to properly read the backs! Somewhere around here I have one of these I somehow acquired as a kid but it's not with the main collection and, truth be told, is semi-lost.

Here's a 1968 Ray Shafer card I just picked up-it's actually got a slight diamond cut, typical for Topps at the time unfortunately:  

More on that story here. Topps must have gotten a boost from him when they moved their plant to Duryea, PA from Brooklyn in early 1966 and helped out his campaign; it's certainly one of the more unusual items they ever produced.

Finally, here's a group of early 1960's Bazooka pennants:

At some point in the future I am going to try and disentangle all the various Bazooka baseball premiums but it's a major job. See ya next time!

Gee Whiz Kids

My rule of thumb putting together my collection of Topps type cards has always been that anything I have on my wantlist appeared in a retail pack or store setting at some point. I exclude standalone candy and gum products for the most part unless they are pretty early (nothing really after the mid 50's) and my interest in Bazooka comics peters out by the mid 60's. I collect some proof items (examples of Bewitched, Bonanza for instance) but they are not part of the core mission.  Those two are in the price guides generally--and are thought of by many as being part of the "Topps experience"-- but there is a lot of stuff that doesn't make the grade or just wasn't known about when the formative guides were published in the 80's and early 90's.  This puts some things into WTF territory!

Take a look at this grouping below:

The little piece of cardboard in the upper left measures 1" x 1 3/4", so you can get a feel for the other items in that scan, which I will address individually.

The cardboard piece is the biggest head-scratcher in this group. I got it from Bob Marcy's amazing non-sports notebooks at the 2015 National, although Bob was not in attendance at the time. He had it with the 1949 X-Ray Roundup cards in a binder and given his depth of knowledge on all things non-sports, that's how I have categorized it.  However, it's slightly bigger than the cards proper and the jagged short edge is interesting.  I am thinking it's related somehow to the vending boxes for this set but I'm really not too sure.

This bad boy seems related to X-Ray Roundup as well. It's 1 1/16" tall and as you can maybe see, is folded in a bit.  I am loathe to unfurl it given its fragility and it seems a little too wide for the set but right now that's the attribution.

This one's easier and belongs to the classic 1952 Look 'N' See set.

Last up, 1957 Isolation Booth as near as I can tell although there's a few later candidates:

Unopened packs likely yielded all the red cello viewers but it's pretty amazing these have survived. Topps would issue sets needing viewers into the 60's; I think they are pretty groovy!.

Pixie Must

Topps has been a sporadic producer of albums during the course of their almost seventy year history of issuing cards.  Their two small (about 4" x 5") Hocus Focus albums were issued in 1948-49 and designed to house a full 126 card series of the set commonly referred to as Magic Photo. Topps did a lot of bifurcating when it came to naming their gum and associated card sets back then, so Hocus Focus was the name of the gum.

Little slits were made on pages of black paper to hold the cards in the pre-plastic days. However, Topps did themselves one better when they came up with an album for the Pixie gum card set known as X-Ray Roundup. Thanks to a pickup of three Pixie albums over the summer by Friend o'the Archive Tom Boblitt, we can take a look-see at a very clever construct.

The cover mimics that of the Hocus Focus album:

The trick here is captured in the cover text "with both sides always on show". Recall that the cards were designed with a magic "X-Ray" feature on the reverse.  Well this album was designed to showcase both sides of the card while still using black paper pages:

Neat, huh?!  Plastic pages have been around the hobby for almost 40 years now but before the late 70's it was paper all the way.

You can see the checklist peeking through.  Topps subdivided the set into four broad subjects and moved the numbering around a little; here's some detail from the back inside cover:

That little viewer was a red plastic magnifying glass. I used to have one but it's been misplaced over the years. The packs included a red piece of cello to allow the hidden picture to show through:

The little peepholes allowed a partial glimpse of the x-ray!

The back of the album is blank, the tape is a later addition I guess, maybe the original owners attempt to house the cello paper?

The staples were possible as the album only had nine pages (and only held 81 cards). The earlier Hocus Focus album used brass fasteners.

The album ("holder") and "viewer" were advertised as part of the issue, this is the interior of the penny wrapper:

Considering vending boxes only had about 30 different subjects in a difficult collation and there were no nickel packs, I doubt more than a handful of folks put together a full set as a kid. Kudos to anyone who did!

Mid Century Mindfreak

It's been a wild month for auctions, with a half dozen major ones concluding recently.  A surfeit of goodies for sure and I wonder if so many auctions happening at once depresses prices but I digress. Big auctions usually mean new stuff coming out of the floorboards and such, especially old boxes and uncut sheets.  This season's offerings do not disappoint.

First up, an uncut sheet with a full set of Flags Of All Nations/Soldiers of the World, a 1949 Topps penny tab insert offered by Heritage:

Such a colorful piece!  I'm fairly certain it was done by Solomon & Gelman. That's a whole dollar's worth of product there! The flags side has a nice look as well:

More uncut goodness from this auction, a 1949 X-Ray Roundup set on two 100 card halves.  I think this sheet was cut as I've seen one with all 200 cards.

Dig the patterns on the reverse, they are downright mesmerizing:

Here's a closeup of two of the quadrants:

Neat, huh? You can see the blue images of the "X-Ray"pictures underneath.

It's not all uncut sheet though, they even had this baby, devoid of lollipops but wondrous nonetheless (and mine!):

Dig that two tone Topps logo! The reverse confirms only the larger, "metal" denominations came with this configuration:

Hakes had a penny tab box of World Coins in their latest:

There's even another iteration of packaging for this set, which probably had a two year shelf life from 1949-51 and is one of the more confusing issues ever put out by Topps. Click through here if you want to see it.

So many treasures......

Loafing Around

Well campers, I have finally added an old piece, long sought, to the permanent collection here at the Main Topps Archives Research Complex.  Those of you whose memories are less permeable than mine will certainly recall a post last year discussing a stamp version of 1949 Topps X-Ray Roundup cards.  Aunt Hannah's was a subsidiary of Baur's Bread that had a history of premium offers in what must have been an ultra-competitive marketplace for enriched white bread after World War 2. Time frame-wise, they issued the stamp premiums replicating the Topps card set of 200 subjects around 1950 I would estimate.

The stamps are found pretty easily but the album pages they were to be affixed to are a more difficult quarry. I had previously assumed these pages were made of paper but they are actually thin cardboard, about the same thickness as a 1980's Topps card.  This one has the stamps affixed and you can see they were designed to display 25 at a time:

Some of the stamps are still connected to each other; sheets are known with all 25 stamps still "unburst".  I have seen the 25 stamp quadrants (they came from either a 100 or 200 stamp sheet) but don't have one of my own to show.  They look really cool as one piece though and I want to picture one so here is an example that (I think) came from Todd Riley:

Looks like a bite was taken out of the bottom to allow a full sheet of 25 to be held in place without sticking them.  Here is the back of the page and you can see where the little half moon could be pushed out at the bottom (under "Loaf"):

With all due respect to Aunt Hannah, "meh".  I want to focus though, on a small feature, namely two punchholes, best seen on the front in the detail:

You can see two little unpunched holes t left of rows 1 and 4, which clearly relate to an album.  I have not, as of today, been able to spy an album anywhere but intend to keep looking.  Robert Edward Auctions had a sheet of 100 stamps up for bid not too long ago:

REA also had a proof block of ten, possibly cards and not stamps but still a neat item:

Aunt Hannah certainly had a nice "in" with Topps, didn't they?

Just Kidd-ing

As I was preparing the previous post here at the ol' Archives, concerning the copying of certain 19th Century artwork by Topps, particularly Indian Chiefs and Pirates, I decided not to use Captain Kidd in the comparison. However, as I was looking at the various examples of his cards, I noticed something neat.

Take a look at this N19 of Kidd, which I cribbed from Cardboard Junkie:

Now, we know form our previous post that the images from this set were used by Topps for X-Ray Roundup in 1949:

I have to say the image of the Captain hanging from the gallows is quite picturesque.....




OK so continuing on, there is a Captain Kidd card in 1952's Look 'N' See set:  

Wow-it's almost an exact match to the one from '49 but on closer inspection it's redrawn.  






Now let's look at Scoop, from 1954:

Arrggghhhh!  


I thought the chain was broken but then I looked at the flipside:

Those sneaky so-and-so's just copied the Look 'N' See picture-the background is an exact match! 




Now at this point you would think Topps was done with the captain, but n-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o, he makes yet another appearance 13 years later in 1967's Who Am I?:

Sheesh!

This is actually bad news-now I will have to do a comparison not only of the 1888 Pirates of the Spanish Main set with X-Ray Roundup but of Look 'N' See to Scoop and on to Who Am I? as there are numerous subjects shared by all these sets.  Sigh.....

(Apologies again for the vertical spacing. Something strange is happening with Blogger and I can't figure out how to fix it.)