Ersatz All Folks

Hey kids-kind of a "so good it could be real" post today, so hang on for a fun ride!

Here's a couple of esoteric Topps sales stimulators I found from an old Morphy Auction some time ago.  These are of the neater items I've seen in the ersatz-promo vein.  The first is a "Baseball Certificate" which very much resembles an admission ticket of yore-because it actually was one!  It's hard to read but it indeed bestowed a granstand seat to the bearer.  This may have been from a Bazooka contest but I'm having trouble tracking which one so perhaps it was instead from a distributor contest, something Topps ran with regularity.

Next up, we get this fantastic item from two years later, hawking the first Topps Baseball inserts (Baseball Stamps) and the standalone albums used to house them:

That was clearly designed to look like a Western Union telegram and given that Thanksgiving is almost upon us, this one seems apt to show as an example (plus it was sent on the exact day I was born!):

Western Union killed off telegrams on January 27, 2006 in case you were wondering why you hadn't received one lately!

Topps would up their game considerably in 1962 with faux fiat currency.  I can't find any promotional material for these, which doesn't mean there wasn't any of course, but it's MIA right now.

Baseball Bucks came first and were an entirely separate product from the flagship Baseball, sold in one and five cent retail packs.  This is a typical example, tilt and all:

The change of seasons brought Football Bucks of course, which might be the most miscut-prone issue Topps ever produced.  These were pack inserts with the regular issue Football set:

And if you lived in Canada Hockey Bucks also saw daylight once a pack of Hockey cards was opened, although they had a decidely North of the Border look. These are not the easiest things to find:

Still tilted after all these years!

-30-

Quality Was Job One

Seeing how I showed a slew of old Topps gum scans from the 30's and 40's last time out (wrappers and yes, gum) , I feel it's time to share two scans sent by friend o'the archive Jeff Shepherd that give a glimpse as to how Topps marketed their products in the very early days. Topps upper management, which was dominated by the Shorin brothers in the first twenty years, did not leave anything to chance. They paid for third party market research and they also paid for some high quality advertising.

This ad sheet would have been handed out at various confectionery trade events and conventions and may date from 1938 or '39:



I love the noir-ish, deco-ish look to the ad; it's a very well executed piece and brings home the fact the gum was being marketed to an adult crowd originally. The back is more prosaic:



As readers of this blog know, 60 Broadway was where Topps first set up shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The building was known as the Gretsch building, built in 1915 and rehabbed around 2005 into an ultra ritzy condo building. The text really leads me to believe this ad sheet dates right from the startup of the company, although it's possible it was just a little bit later on if over the counter sales of the gum came first.

Topps used the distribution channels established by American Leaf Tobacco Company, another Shorin family business, to quickly establish a national presence for their gum line. By 1940, as we have seen previously, they were well distributed nationally and were about to contract with the US Government to provide gum for military field rations. The 1940's were very good indeed to Topps Chewing Gum.