We Pass The Savings On To You

Friend o'the Archive Mike Savage recently sent along some significant lists of specials from Woody Gelman's Card Collectors Company, issued but a mere fifty years (!) ago. There is some excellent information contained in these flyers about a brace of test issues which feature some of the toughest items Topps ever put out and show how CCC was used as as one of their conduits for unsalable overstock.

Today let's take a look at Specials of the Month list #4, which came riding along with a more traditional CCC catalog in this handily postmarked envelope:

I don't have a copy to show from my collection but that would have been Catalog #26 in there, dated January 15, 1974.  The list of specials is a wonder to behold:

In order, from the top we get a series of older insert and oddball sets being bled off, plus some excess from Woody's personal stock of tobacco cards.  The 1951 Red Backs were still being stocked, almost a quarter-century after their issue (and 1952 reissue)-impressive!  The tobacco cards were from the T205 and T206 sets and would have been alien to most of the CCC audience.  The 1959 Fleer Ted Williams set was not, as we have learned in the sixty-five years since it's issue, "very scarce" and in fact is quite common.  Even the elusive card #68, which was pulled over a rights issue with Topps involving the use of Bucky Harris's image, has been graded in abundance over at PSA, with 1,140 slabbed and counting.

1969 Super Baseball was a set that was held in some abundance by CCC and hopefully this list got people ordering it because about fifteen months later, their warehouse would be substantially consumed in a fire, with the set's population being disproportionately wrecked. Those sets purchased from CCC after the fire would often come with singed edges!  The 1968 and 1969 inserts were pure overstock and while it's not at all clear if the 1968 Baseball Game being offered was the boxed version, the "Batter Up" language suggests it could be. The 1964 Giant Baseball cards were massively overproduced as Topps issued them after the 1964 All-Star game to middling consumer interest.  Those 1970 Super Football cards, while not as common as the '64 Giants, seem like they suffered from a lack of interest as well.

This is all preamble though, as we get to the meat of the specials.

1973 Baseball Team Checklists? Those were the blue bordered ones that almost no one seems to recall getting in packs that year. Now, were they sourced loose or from the extremely scarce perforated mail-in premium sheet?

Next up, the 1973 Baseball Candy lids.  I find it hard to believe but I've never really posted about these, or the actual lids at least. While surviving quantities are pretty high for a true test issue (I suspect regional tests vs. the old, semi-mythical Brooklyn candy store tests for these), they are somewhat tough, especially in nice shape. The little lift-up tab is usually found creased and bent and then the images are often horribly off-center.  This one's not so bad actually:

Moving along, here you could have purchased the eight-card '53 Reprint "set" that Topps mysteriously produced in 1972, allegedly for a banquet or gathering of some sort. It's a bizarre set, with misidentifications and a bewildering assortment of players.  Here's a proof sheet of the eight subjects from this difficult issue:

The 1973 "Baseball Cloth Sticker Sets" are the cloth versions of the 1973/74 Action Emblems, an abortive Topps attempt to circumvent the licensing of team logos from MLBPC. These are not well-known and I'm not sure if PSA even grades them. They seem to suffer from the adhesive being somewhat melty and gooey if not stored properly over the years:

Toward the bottom we have two inexorably linked sets (due to a common player selection) from 1973, the uber-difficult Baseball Comics and Baseball Pin-Ups.  I think they are also linked in a way to the Action Emblems in that they feature no logos. Either way, they are a really superb looking set:

I'm not sure why but the Pin-Ups are a little more available and survive at almost exactly a 2:1 ratio compared to the Comics, but make no mistake they are also extremely hard to find:

Concluding today's look back in wonder, we have the 1972 Cloth Baseball Stickers.  I think the reference to 55 being in the set is a typo, no one has seen more than the 33 known subjects in full, all neatly doubled in full array on this uncut sheet that displays portions of both slits. Some very tantalizing slivers can be seen too but I can't say undamaged stickers exist for these edge riders:

These are roughly as prevalent as the 1973 Baseball Pin-Ups, although it's worth noting those truncated stickers at the top of the sheet do turn up in their slightly decapitated form, as do all the others to a lessening degree.  This seems to have been a materials test, which was continued in 1976 before Topps finally got the formula down for 1977.

Topps had a couple of other dealers who helped send this stuff out into the world, like Bill Haber, who was a Topps employee just like Gelman but preferred selling things directly at New York City area collectible shows, which were not exactly in abundance at the time.  You really needed some expert timing to take advantage and realistically, it wasn't the average ten-year-old buying up all the test issues.

Miami Nice

I've written a couple of posts over the years about the 1973/74 Topps Action Emblems, which was an attempt by the company to introduce their own versions of Major League Baseball team logos that likely arose out of a desire to stop paying licensing fees to MLB.  The set is not widely known as it doesn't depict any players as subjects and while examples can be found on eBay they are not all that plentiful.  In addition, three differing formats/mediums were used.  Here is a typical example:

Certainly less well known among collectors are mockups of some football versions of the Action Emblems. This one has been known for a while and features fanciful Atlanta and Miami logos:

  

Love the palm trees!  Now that was the only example I had ever seen of the football version but another has popped up of late:

More ersatz logos, this time for Chicago and Baltimore. Topps did not have a license to use the NFL team logos for any of their sets issued between 1970 and 1981 (see here for some really good background on this) and I would date these mockups to the mid 1970's. So this has me thinking that instead of avoiding the use of the official logos, Topps also wanted to avoid use of the team names. It never came to anything but I wonder if a dispute was brewing with either or both of MLB and the NFL at the time over using the team names. The baseball stickers only have city names as well so it's plausible. Let's not forget how they avoided using the Astros team name for a good portion of the 60's due to a lawsuit over Astroturf-Topps was clearly sensitive to potential litigation in this area.

I wonder if any more of the football mockups exist? I'd love to see them if they do.

Action Traction

It's been quite a while since I posted here on the 1973/74 Action Emblems, which were an attempt by Topps to circumvent negotiating with Major League Baseball for the right to use team logos on their cards.  Topps instead created their own logos in what can only be considered an act of corporate hubris.

As noted previously, there were three types of stickers issued: the main, original cloth, glossy and then a cardboard version that may have been a proof (but which may have found its way into packs). The cloth versions seem to suffer from an excess of adhesive and that may have caused Topps to switch to the glossy format. I finally landed a glossy sticker and can now show the characteristics:

The front shows a clear score mark between the top and bottom stickers:

The back is white sticker stock.  For some reason I expected tan but it's clearly not:

Compare that to the reverse of a cloth sticker:

The excess adhesive leeched through enough to make the sticker backing somewhat transparent and you can see how the front "floats".  The front shows the same effects as well:

I've wondered a few times why Topps issued such a set and then issued it again.  Perhaps they were competing with Fleer, which often had team logo sets out on the store shelves.  It's a strange issue.

Topps Action Emblems

This is the culmination of what has turned into a de facto three part series on Topps resistance to certain licensing fees in the early 1970’s. You can see the beginnings here and some further background here. Unable to eliminate the licensing fees to the Major League Baseball Players Association for the use of player likenesses (for obvious reasons) Topps tried to eliminate team logos on certain test and limited release sets in 1973.

It is possible, though far from certain, that Topps may have been asserting they had the right to use team names and logos in all baseball sets they issued, not just the main set, and the Major League Baseball Promotions Corporation (representing the teams) resisted. At some point, the powers that be in Brooklyn elected to create their own version of logos for all 24 teams. The result was a bizarre set called Action Emblems.

Action Emblems were first proofed on cardboard in the winter of 1973 and here is a good look at some of them.

You will notice the large team logo on the upper part of the panel and the smaller city pennant below. (There are different versions for each team in NY and Chicago). Here is a proof panel which clearly shows a date stamp of January 26, 1973.

I am aware of two full proof sheets showing this date as well. Given the proof date, it would point to a spring release and Topps likely tested the emblems, which were cloth stickers

in these packs at first (None of the packs or wrappers are mine):

At some point glossy stickers started to appear, possibly due to an abundance of stock being used for the exploding Wacky Packages stickers. This necessitated a change in the wrapper (still a test version as evidenced by the white wax with a sticker applied to the front).

The word “cloth” has disappeared from the description on the pack! Here is a swiped scan from an auction a while back showing the glossy stockers, which can be differentiated from the cardboard proofs due to the score mark between the upper and lower portions.

The associated Rub Off Game cards were taller than the Action Emblems and account for the “tallboy” pack.

Now the tale turns trickier. Action Emblems have generally been noted as a 1974 issue in the hobby, yet we have proofs from a good year earlier. Why? Well, a short history lesson is in order.

Following Jefferson Burdick’s publication of the final American Card Catalog (ACC) in 1960, “Catalog Updates” --coordinated by famous St. Louis collector and ACC contributor Buck Barker-- began to appear in the “Card Collector’s Bulletin”, an early and widely read (for the time) hobby publication. These were printed from November 1960 to February 1972 and documented and cataloged the various card releases over that period, generally lagging behind by a year or so. Another hobby publication “The Trader Speaks” started around 1967 and also helped document what was hitting the candy store counters and supermarket aisles of America. I mention this because there is much more certainty with the dating of issues since the early 60’s than there had been before, thanks to these publications; a lot of the guesswork that happened with dates of issue for sets was now eliminated. If there was a reference to 1974 for the Action Emblems, it was likely correct. But...

I could never reconcile the date disparity until I happened across an auction for an Action Emblems pack that advertised “2 glossy and 1 cloth” sticker as being in the pack (wording was on the bottom part of the wrapper, not the title). Now as luck would have it, I did not save a scan of that particular pack. If I find it again, I will post it here and also in a short update.

It occurred to me after seeing this pack that the likely chain of events was a 1973 launch date for the original cloth version followed by the hybrid, “2 glossy, 1 cloth” pack later in ’73 or ‘early ’74 followed by a third and final version (again in a test wrapper) that does not note what type of sticker and therefore allowed Topps to sell either or both types. This may have been the final Topps “rewrap” baseball pack, something I will get into in my next post. It is also possible the second and third packs were issued in reverse order.

In my experience, the Scarcity in versions of the Action Emblems, from easiest to hardest, runs:

1)Cloth Sticker

2)Cardboard Proof

3)Glossy Sticker

But don’t take that as gospel, your experience may vary! And you may be interested to know Topps tried this with football as well (not mine):