While I didn't bid on it, a curious piece of Topps history was hammered on eBay late last year. Using their own employees for photo shoots was a continuing theme with Topps in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of their antics are a little humorous in retrospect.
This is an original photographic pasteup from the archives of Brown Brothers, a stock photo firm that was big for a good chunk of the Twentieth Century:
Lelands has been auctioning off the firm's archival items on the 'Bay and also in some catalog auctions but the three notations are masking another Brown reference, namely the friendly "shopkeeper" pounding a baseball mitt, one Len Brown. Brown was Topps New Product Director Woody Gelman's assistant at the time and he's helping the PR push for those 1963 Bazooka boxes that not only had three package design baseball cards on the revere but five All Time Greats cards within.
These were the boxes being hawked by Len:
The reverse of the photo shows a lot of decrepit rubber cement along with a notation:
They come from a time when Topps was trying to standardize some of their graphics:
The example above is unusual as it's not severely miscut, since most of the set's surviving examples are found that way. In fact, many of its 44 subjects are horizontally-oriented and the cuts can be so bad that the caption is often found above the photo and not below:
Yikes! It's truly a tough issue and finding well-cut cards is super challenging. PSA has graded a mere 60 examples overall with nothing above a grade of 7 given. However, 44 of them are in the sole registry set, which is complete with a GPA of 6.898. By way of reference, 255 Waltons cards have been PSA slabbed (nine 9's given) and over 3,000 1974 Deckles, with seventy-six 10's granted somehow!
