Vend For Yourself

We've got a bit of a conundrum to work through today kids.  A couple of  months ago Heritage Auctions offered a 1959 vending box of Topps Football cards:

Exciting news, right?  Well, there was a definite twist:

Yup, those are bindles of cards, seven per batch and I really don't think that they came that way from Topps. The Trading Card Guild box is 100% correct as that's how Topps branded their cards not sold with gum at the time (and through about 1966) but this was likely the work of a third party repackager. I'm not sure these were bindled for vending machines as it seems superfluous since those devices were designed to dispense cards in pre-measured quantities.  The other thing against them to my mind is Topps would not put in a lot of extra work on resale items.

Two bindles were exposed for the auction and the centering is pretty typical of late 50's Topps cards:

A Topps vending box should have the cards packed neatly, and in a zebra stripe pattern, like this one from 1987:

So color me skeptical that 1959 box left the factory that way.  Anything's possible I guess but I'd need a lot more evidence to be convinced. As part of the web surfing research I did for this post, I found that Topps still makes vending boxes of a sort, although I guarantee these will never see the inside of any kind of dispensing machinery. I think these were only resurrected in 2022:

A breaker on the Jabs Family You Tube channel broke a 2022 vending box and I tried to grab some stills.  The advertised inserts rest on top of the regular issue cards:

There's no real zebra stripe pattern but things are done a lot differently these days.  Topps stopped making the traditional vending boxes in the mid-1990's from what I can tell but I'm not sure of the exact year that happened.

You can watch the whole break here if you like:  

For Art's Sake

In case you haven't noticed there's been some killer auctions of late as tax refund season brings out the big consignments.  The BST Spring Auction was no exception this year, with the bulk of it related to football items (their specialty). They offered  so much good Topps stuff this will be a two-parter.  For today's entry, let's look at some killer original art.

Lew Carpenter is #95 in the 1959 Topps Football set:

That is Woody Gelman's handwriting there on the backing board folks-pay attention to the instructions on the right side border. That picture has been severely Flexichromed-hoo boy!  

No hanging on to Topps property.....

The finished product:

See how Carpenter's head and foot pop out of the background?  That's what Woody was instructing the printer to do in the right side border above.

Here's John David Crow (what a great name), also from 1959.  He won the 1957 Heisman trophy don't you know but here he's been flexichromed to within an inch of his life:

He's more prosaically identified on his card (#105):

Here's ol' King (of the ) Hill, #117:

Moving on to 1962, here's Roman Gabriel:

That's no longer Woody's writing.  Maybe Len Brown?

Here's cad #88 in 1962, you can see why the photo is a square:

Does anyone want to hazard a guess why Y.A. Tittle is shown on the inset photo?!  The numbers don't even match!  More inset photo madness can be found here if you are interested.

Finally , here's # 155 in 1965, Lance Alworth.  Woody's writing has returned but who did the fingerpainting on the backing board?

"1 Flexi Matt" is what the script writing says. I mean, that is almost dayglo, they've touched it up so much:

All that paint (and some of it was used to obscure the tops of his numbers): was used to make this into a football card:

Here's how it all came out, tall boy style:

Notice how you can see some of the obscuring white paint on his uniform, plus some areas that were not touched up.  FLexichrome as a supported process was discontinued in 1961 but Topps must have laid in a gargantuan supply. Crazy!

More auction goodies next time out kids!