The order form, as you can calculate, offers Topps products at 60 cents on the retail dollar. This figure is more amazing when you realize the order form was for a wholesaler (or jobber in the parlance of the trade) who then would have to resell the purchased items to a retailer. Actually, it looks like a slight sale on Bazooka was occurring, whereas Baseball Candy was full price. If you have been paying attention, then you know there were five subsets to Baseball Candy: Red Backs, Blue Backs, Team Cards, Connie Mack All Stars and Major League All Stars. Red and Blue Backs would have been in the one cent packs, a mix of panelized versions of those cards and the others would have been in the nickel packs.
All well and good but that's not why I am posting about this today. Instead I want to explore the phrase "New Baseball Candy" and even more specifically the font used for same. Let's turn things upside down to get a better look:
Look at how the phrase curves and has rounded, almost balloon-like lettering. If you remember back a bit, I had posted a comparison of the playing field that came with 29 cent bagged sets of Red Backs (likely a blowout item issued well after the initial Baseball Candy run) with those that came with the Ed-U-Cards Batter Up baseball game. The fonts look similar but are not an exact match, as this detail from the bagged set shows:
However, the font is closer to that used in the 1949-50 Ed-Cards game:
Still, it's not exact as the bars on the E for example, don't all penetrate to the left of the stem like the order form shows. Nor does the 1957 version from Ed-U-Cards match up either, although it is a match for the bagged setplaying field.:
I'm not sure what to make of all this. There are three different fonts used between the playing fields and the order form, although they all bear a nodding resemblance to each other. I was hoping for an exact match but that's not in the cards....
