All Shook Up

When the nice folks at Mickey's Sportscards sent me some details on the 1949 X-Ray Roundup vending boxes a little while back, they also sent along a pretty cool scan of a 1956 Elvis Presley vending box.  Being that Elvis was the first standard sized (2 1/2" x 3 1/2") issue from Topps, it stands that this is the first standard sized vending box too:

The Trading Card Guild livery is very much in line with the times as Topps preferred, when moving product without gum, to use that clever alter-ego.  The red, white and blue color scheme is also in line with the Shorin family's penchant for patriotically themed graphics, which go back at least to the American Gas Station days during the Depression.

Elvis was a scant 66 cards in length and you would think a vending box would yield  6 or 7 sets but the collation on these  was often quite poor so even one set full set lurking within might have been pushing it.  I have to think this poor collation was done deliberately by Topps to keep the kids buying more cards in a vain attempt to complete a full set.  There would also be myriad centering issues, as was the norm at Topps for decades. Still, a vending box or two of any vintage set would be great fun to rifle through.

The New Standard

Well it's official folks, I am completely flummoxed by the clock at the moment and will be posting a series of shorter posts for the forseeable future.  A combination of personal goings-on, summer vacation, my new gig as a highly compensated columnist for The Wrapper,  a big project (see below) and various real world intrusions have winnowed my timeslice for this blog into an almost invisible fragment.

It's not all bad though, as a lot of of my free time is being spent these days on writing a guide to the early days of Topps, which will be made available when (if?) it's finished as a free PDF download.  When that is, I can't say but I'm hoping it will be around the fall of this year.  So instead of suspending the blog, which I do not want to do, we'll all have to make do with some Penny Arcade posts, purloined Ebay scans and shorter riffs on ancient Topps ephemera for the duration.  I hope to still maintain my twice a week posting schedule though and expect I'll sneak a couple of meatier posts in here and there.

The guide will cover Topps and their history from the founding of the American Leaf Tobacco Company by Morris "Shorin" in either 1890, 1892, 1901, 1904 or 1908 (the last date's a winner methinks) through the end of the Giant Size era following the purchase of Bowman in 1956. Originally I was going to only do a guide to the small, penny tab issues but that morphed into a project that grew and grew and grew.....

So I figured I would present today a look at the one cent wrapper from the first standard size (2 1/2" x 3 1/2") Topps issue, which was Elvis Presley, released in the late fall of 1956.  The Bubbles, Inc. attribution may have meant Topps thought this would be a controversial set.  The penny wrapper is a thing of austere beauty:

The nickel version was a bit more Elvis-like and a lot more exciting:

The cards, sadly, are nothing special (unless you were a teenage girl in 1956, I guess):

Topps was quickly moving toward retouched photos instead of using artwork by this time.  A partial uncut sheet is known:

See ya soon kids!