Highly Irregular

Not really a blog post today, more of an update.  

I've decided to pause the weekly entries, at least for the time being, and move into a cycle of posting only when interesting or new things pop up. This is not health related or anything like that, it's simply a matter of too many things going on, with not enough available hours to properly attend to them. I am wrapped up in three large hobby projects at the moment, two of which are collaborations, with a fourth planned, and feel the quality of the blog has noticeably slipped over the past year or so.  There's been a lot of unforced errors and too many auctions mined of late, which is not really how I envision things should be here. I've been doing this for a long time (this is my 1,160th entry) and still enjoy it and plan to continue, but the finding the time required to properly deploy each post on a weekly basis has been very difficult of late. A long range goal here was/is to have at least one post, highly detailed (or not) for each and every set Topps issued at retail from 1948-80. I'm still hoping to do that but the timetable will be a little less compressed now.

This blog started when I thought a proper, serious look at the history of Topps was sorely needed. I was inspired by Jon Helfenstein's wonderful Fleer Sticker Project and had recently embarked upon my quest to obtain a type card example from all the Topps issues through 1980 when I kicked things off. Originally I only intended to collect and post about Baseball issues but that changed quickly enough as my interests expanded once I realized you had to examine the totality of what Topps was doing to make any sense of it all.  Focusing on a single genre did not allow for that. 

There had been so much incorrect information disseminated in the hobby about the company and its myriad releases that it sometimes seemed like what was out there was as highly fictionalized as a novel, with little based upon fact. A large part of that was due to Topps itself and the way they used mostly made-up PR to ever-so-carefully reveal their story. At the same time they maintained almost no cohesive corporate records beyond those kept by Woody Gelman and Ben Solomon in the New Product and Art Departments; archives long since disseminated or lost. A lot of hearsay and guesswork was spread in old hobby papers and now, of course, we have the massive online hobby community that often seems like it helps those old, wayward narratives much more than it hurts them. I've tried to address the conventional hobby wisdom where needed (as best I could) and hope I've somewhat succeeded in clarifying some of that.

I've learned so much from writing this blog and it's led me to people and places I never thought possible to meet or visit. The dedicated reader base is here is small but mighty and the contributions of images and information many of you have sent to me over the years has been heartening. Please, please keep sending me these images and information!

So stay tuned, there is definitely more to come, still on Saturday at 8 AM Eastern, just a little more spread out going forward, so exactly which Saturdays is TBD, as is when the next post will appear, although it should be some time in January. I'll get into my various projects down the road but can offer way-too-minimal details on the biggest one, which is a biography of Woody Gelman I have been researching and writing for five-plus years now.  The initial draft is finally closing in on completion and a hoped-for artwork-enhanced-book makes it one of the collaborations I mentioned above. There's a lot more under the hood there, but for now that's all the news that fits...

...well, except for this little gem - a Bill Gallo cartoon Dick Young inserted into his New York Daily News column in 1965 after Topps prevailed in their federal anti-trust case; it seems a fitting way to end the year:

Flag Day

Longtime readers here may recall that about eight years ago I took a look at the some of the later Flags of the World sets sporadically issued by Topps over more than two decades. If you refer back to that post, you will see Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins had some personal experience with one of the test issues Topps created when they wanted to issue an updated version of their Giant Size, colorful and classic 1956 Flags set.  

Prior to the 1970 Flags of the World "sticker" set seeing release, they tested the concept using either reprinted or leftover cards from the 1956 set.  These were inserted into a small envelope, which was needed as the older cards were larger than the standard 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" in use at the time; there was also a piece of play money in each pack that required folding  to fit, just like the oversized inserts for the 1968 Basketball test. The currency was a new sweetener, the 1956 set did not have any inserts and Topps really didn't come around to the concept until 1960 anyway. The Flags test looks like it happened in 1969, or at least that's the best guess on timing.

Here's the envelope (ignore the numbering added after the fact by a third party and which is unrelated to any part of the test), in better resolution than the one I showed eight years ago:

Way back in 2017, Lonnie advised:

"The card numbers were for the original 1956 Flags of the World set, which were the cards contained in the envelopes. My memory is not that good, but I think I had close to 2/3rds of the complete set. They were Indistinguishable from the original '56 cards, so no good way to tell they were test cards other than I knew they came from the envelopes. My theory is Topps was actually testing the "money" insert idea, not the cards themselves, and probably used either left over proof sheets (would have only taken 2 or 3 sheets to fill a couple of boxes) they had in archive, or did a small print run from the '56 films. I guess the '70 Flags of the World cards themselves either were not in development yet or not ready for testing. Using the '56 cards, which were over-sized compared to the modern standard, is why I believe they used an envelope instead of a plain wax wrapper; their wrapping machines could not handle the larger cards.... My theory is that Topps only used the envelopes for over-sized or odd-shaped items that could not be wrapped on their machines."

Unless there's thinner 56's out there, I lean toward old overstock being used.  Even if Topps had none of the actual 1956 cards on hand, Woody Gelman's Card Collectors Company would have been able to assist with minty fresh cards. The play money did indeed look real, and was not limited to a single size either:

Flipsided:

The story, as noted by Lonnie, that the test currency was too realistic looking. Based upon this 1963 Un Guarini from Paraguay, I would have to agree, especially on the obverse:

(Real Paraguayan Currency)

Topps corrected this problem for the 1970 full retail release, as they prominently indicated NON-NEGOTIABLE on each piece of play money:

They also made it clear that, in addition to the added NON-NEGOTIABLE line, the currency was not issued by an actual country. "Triniday and Lobags" sounds like a nice place to visit though!

You can see they were each folded before pack insertion; Topps also did this with the How To Play Better Basketball inserts that came in the 1968 test Basketball envelopes. The 1970 currency is somewhat difficult to track down and I suspect it's because the wet and stick approach the the Flags set proper was not popular with the kids, resulting in poor sales. Thinking about it, why even make them stickers, let alone low-tech ones?

As always, be careful with your money!

Grue-some

Among the trove of super tough Topps tests recently hammered by various auctioneers, one non-sports release really stood out to me.  Issued (barely) in 1968, Gruesome Greetings have been on the wantlists of many collectors for decades.  Recently, a good chunk of gruesomeness was sold by the The Collector Connection and then some more oozed out at Vintage Non Sports Auctions. I feel a post-mortem is in order.

A whimsical approach to the macabre, with a detour to some kind of dark Valentine's Day was the theme of the 44 larger size cards in the set auctioned by The Collector Connection, all from the Roxanne Toser collection:

The fronts were from the hand of Gahan Wilson, a master of wryly gothic, head-scratching illustrations that permeated Playboy for decades. How he ended up doing a job for Topps is something I'd love to know. The work doesn't really display his trademark dark witticism though, and I assume he was illustrating gags that were provided to him by Topps.

Wilson on the fronts, Jack Davis on the backs, but just the one image there, repeated 44 times:

Yonks ago, the Topps Vault (which is now shuttered) had an uncut sheet:

The Vault also had a box flat proof, which is where the card set derives it full name:

I love the unusual packaging and card colors; Topps was in a highly experimental stage when they tested these but the card buying public didn't like what was being offered.

Vintage Non-Sports Auctions recently had a lot of 24 GG, here's three of them:

Gags aside, they're pretty great!

A 1993 set shared the same name but had a totally different vibe, featuring John Pound Art in booklet form  That set was popular, unlike the original, and each three card pack offered one subject that had a "scratch 'n' stink feature (!).  I'm not really familiar but there's a good writeup: here.

WE HAVE A SAME DAY UPDATE! The first comment here (thank you) brought up a Heritage Auction from August of this year offering an uncut white border/background set with completed salmon backs. It seems there were two tests, or maybe a reconfigured one, which Topps sometimes did with their Valentine's Day and Hallowe'en sets from this era.

I wonder if they dialed back on an all black set, as only four (and a half) have that color background here.

Topps loved this salmon tone at the time...

Wheel Of Confusion

Recently I posted about some of the 3-D prototypes that have popped up in various auctions this Fall, noting there was a little more that could be shown.  Well, here is something that's pretty way out that was part of one trove:

Like, wow man! Isn't that crazy?  Here's a closeup of part of the disc:

I really have no idea what's going on there but I like it quite a bit.  That disc actually rode atop the three 3-D Soccer prototypes that were recently discussed here. Here's an image of the full page from the marketing book, courtesy of  Friend o'the Archive Andrew Wolfe:

As I have mentioned previously, Look Magazine was owned by Cowles Communications, who in turn owned the only printing press - via their Visual Panographics subsidiary - able to produce such wonders. At some point Xograph, which had a similar 3-D process, licensed their tech to Cowles. Both Visual Panograhics and Xograph are mentioned on the back stamps of some 1968 Baseball 3-D cards, so I suspect a patent battle was staved off by that, or some specific form of the technology was needed to pull off certain feats. Xograph, in case you have forgotten, was the trade name for "parallax panoramagram", a particular brand of lenticular technology (other forms were developed by Vari-Vue and Kodak Eastman), so it's an open question as to what was being prepared to show to Topps versus what was being made available to all potential clients.