The End Of Topps (Not-So-Slight Return)

Well, the inevitable happened the other day as Michael Eisner's Tornante Company and his partners, Madison Dearborn, sold off the last remaining bit of Topps Chewing Gum, or more properly these days, The Topps Company. It wasn't really the end of the company founded as a partnership by the Shorin Family in 1938, which to my mind occurred when Eisner's group and Madison Dearborn bought out, quite acrimoniously it seems, the remaining Shorin's (and a host of other stockholders) for $385.4 Million on March 6, 2007, bit it certainly put a final cap on the era of the founders.

That 2007 deal was nudged by an activist investor group called Pembridge Capital, which held seats on the Topps board. Despite some drama that included arch rival Upper Deck making a game attempt to swoop in, the original deal went through, ex-CEO Arthur Shorin sold his 2.7 Million shares at $9.75 a pop (for a pretty tasty haul of $22.425 Million), and Michael Eisner took over at Topps. Nice work if you can get it!

So today I thought I'd take a look at some key Topps business activity today both before and after things got Mickey-Moused.

Founded as a partnership between the four Shorin brothers (and probably their silent-partner father Morris), Topps began doing business in December of 1938 with a sole product called Topps Gum, which sold for a penny. They endured the shortages and privations of World War 2 by selling this one product and some ration and shortage induced low-sugar candy bars, then came up with all-time winner Bazooka bubble gum in the late summer of 1947, a vital catalyst for their growth. 

Introducing baseball cards of a sort in 1951 in the bizarre set dubbed Baseball Candy, which despite getting Topps royally sued and cease-and-desisted, led them to double down and come out with the now classic 1952 Baseball set, which helped build their profits and signaled the start of an as-yet uninterrupted-run of annual issues covering the game of sphere and ash. This led to a very litigious four-year period before Topps ended up purchasing their biggest rival, Bowman, in February 1956 when the parent company of that venerable Philadelphia firm (Connelly Containers) elected to pursue other, and quite lucrative, business opportunities.

Topps weathered challenges thereafter from Fleer, the Federal Trade Commission, the Major League Baseball Players Association and other, smaller antagonists before floating an IPO of 435,000 shares of common stock in March of 1972, which saw the company listed on the American Stock Exchange, initially valued at $17.50 per share, or $7,612,500. There were also apparently a gaggle of preferred voting shares that I'm still trying, somewhat listlessly, to untangle that allowed the Shorin's and their various in-laws and allies to essentially retain full control of the company. (UPDATE 4/12/24: I just found an article indicating only 25% of the company was being listed, so the valuation was $30,450,000).

I think this specimen shows how the issued stock certificates looked in 1972 as dot-matrix computer printing and boxed CUSIP numbers were in use by then but this version is from 1978 so I can't be sure:

The AMEX ticker symbol was TOPPSG. 

In 1975 Fleer sued them in an action that led to the 1981 expansion of the baseball card market and ultimately rocket-fueled the growth of of the hobby. In 1983 the Topps board agreed to a leveraged buyout by an investor group headed by Forstmann Little. This deal closed in early 1984 and 3.6 Million shares of Topps common stock were gobbled up at $26.25 per share, valuing the now-private company at roughly $94.5 Million.

In May 1987 a NASDAQ IPO saw Topps issue 1.7 Million shares (described as 31% of "itself" amusingly enough) and be rebranded as The Topps Company, Inc. The $13 stock price meant a total valuation of around $71.29 Million, which seems like a bit of a devaluation (hard to tell with this stuff, there's so many loopholes and ins-and-outs). I ended up with a share of same in 1994 thanks to an old buddy named Dale Beaumont:

This bubbled along, despite the inevitable ups-and-downs of the stock market, quite nicely overall until Mr. Eisner and Madison Dearborn came along with their $385.4 Million in 2007 and took the company private once again, with the Shorin's and friends no longer directly involved once the deal closed, although some family and insiders fulfilled (very brief) consulting roles with the new ownership group. 

Eisner though, kept the company fairly intact in spirit and fact after the purchase and then tried to sell the whole magilla for $1.3 Billion in 2021 after his plans for expansion ran up against Madison Dearborn's preference to control costs and merely ride profits forward. That deal - which seemingly turned into a disaster when Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association decided to let their licensing with Topps expire eleven days before the close of the deal and instead go with Fanatics -  would have seen a hedge fund called Mudrick Capital take control.  Mudrick planned to merge with Topps, while Eisner planned to roll his 46 Million shares (worth $800 Million plus kids!) into the new company, which was intended to operate as a SPAC, while Madison Dearborn cashed out entirely. The stock symbol would have been: TOPP

There was a lot of boo-hooing in the press about how he got snookered and was no longer a force in the business world (and in fairness, no one at Topps seemed to catch on that MLB/MLBPA and Fanatics were in their own talks) but in the end Eisner seems like he ended up doing OK. Fanatics bought the Topps brand, assets and licenses in either very late December 2021 or very early January 2022 for $500 Million or so (the exact figure seems to be slightly less than that round number) while Eisner and Madison Dearborn held onto Bazooka Candy Brands and a gift card services unit called TDS, which stood for Topps Digital Services.  

You know those giant racks of gift cards you see at the supermarket?  TDS provide the processing backbone for them! Topps seems to have acquired that firm, originally called GMG Lifestyle Entertainment, then based in Minneapolis, sometime during the reign of Eisner (and possibly as early as 2007) but specifics are a little hard to find due to this all being in the realm of private equity. I suspect the original GMG involvement was to help Topps manage all of their redemption and loyalty programs.

Bazooka Candy Brands, despite the fading market share of its namesake bubble gum, still manufactures, among a myriad of other confections, Ring Pops, which sell gloriously year-after-sticky-fingered-year. That remnant of the business was sold to Apax Partners for a reported $700 Million in October 2023. Then early 2024 saw the sale of TDS to Ziff-Davis for a rumored $170 Million, formally ending the Eisner era at Topps.

If you are tallying all that at home, it adds up to around $1.37 Billion, essentially what the 2021 sale to Mudrick Capital was to gross. I dunno, maybe this Eisner guy is pretty good at business after all!

There's A Lot At Steak

If you read almost anything at all about the history of Topps and in particular Sy Berger, their one time Promotions Manager who ended up heading their Sports Department for many years, you will invariably run across the phrase "steak money." This is what Berger referred to as the initial payment to a minor leaguer who, in the eyes of Topps, had eventual major league potential. This was done in order to contractually bind the player to Topps, no small thing throughout the course of Berger's employment.  This "stake" was always described as enough to allow the new signee to go buy a steak, which makes it a homonym in this context. The amount of this initial check?  Five bucks!

Well, you can tell this is a tale reflecting prices from a long, long time ago as five dollar steaks at a decent restaurant haven't been priced at that level since the early 1980's (if not earlier). There is a famous story about Topps shunning Maury Wills, never offering him steak money, and the long standing grudge held by the 1962 National League MVP, who was also key member of three World Champion Dodgers teams, that led him to boycott the company until 1967. Wills is an interesting subject, who we will return to momentarily but first, why not show what these checks actually looked like.

The front is extremely precise, isn't it?!

Well it's no surprise these were pre-printed as Berger and his scouts (primarily Turk Karam until he passed in 1963) must have carried sheafs of these around with them at Spring Training every year. Just fill in the date and name and all was well! The "signature" is that of Louis Walker, a long time Topps Treasurer who also had a seat on their board. Here's our man:

The date this version of the check was used would be after 1963, when ZIP codes were implemented. The 254 36th St. address was in use for decades by Topps, starting in 1956 and I believe until they moved their corporate office out of Brooklyn and into Manhattan in the mid-1990's.

The really interesting part is on the back, where once endorsed the player was legally signed to a Topps contract, most assuredly also carried around in volume as well by the various Topps agents. I believe this check-based arrangement is referred to as a Facultative Endorsement. Yup, it was an important five bucks!

Now, back to Mr. Wills, who in 1951 broke in with the Dodgers D-Level affiliate in Hornell, New York which was in the old Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York (PONY) League. He was scrawny but was always younger than the league's average age wherever he played, at least until 1962 when he was 28 and an established major leaguer. 

Wills progressed fairly quickly (albeit quite typically for the times) through the Dodgers minor league system, reaching AA-Level by 1955 then stalled out, with a demotion to A-Ball in 1956 following a subpar season.  I originally guessed 1956 or maybe 1957 was the year of the snub as Bowman was snapped up by Topps in early '56 when Wills was actively descending  the minor league ladder. In fact, he played with Cincinnati's PCL affiliate in Seattle for the 1957 season after they selected his contract from Brooklyn in the annual Rule 5 draft. The Reds sent him back to the Dodgers (with a brief stop elsewhere) in 1958 and he played for Spokane in the PCL until he was called up in the middle of the 1959 season to Los Angeles and sparked the Dodgers down the stretch, even garnering some down ballot MVP votes.

What actually happened though, according to a 2011 article in the Los Angeles Times, was that the "brief stop elsewhere" was due to Wills being given an opportunity to try out for the Tigers during Spring Training in 1959, on the condition of being returned to the Dodgers if he failed, which he did. Topps had Turk Karam scouting the Tigers camp as this was happening and he passed on Wills after being told by several Tigers staffers that Maury would never play in the bigs. He was sent packing back to the Dodgers organization where his manager in Spokane (Bobby Bragan) turned him into a switch hitter with almost instantaneous results and basically, Wills never looked back. When Dodgers shortstop Don Zimmer got hurt, Maury was called up and that, as they say, was that. He literally went from zero to hero in one magical season as the Dodgers took the Fall Classic in six from the Go-Go Sox.

The lack of a Topps contract didn't stop Wills from appearing in numerous sets before 1967. In addition to several regionals, he was a Fleer subject in their 1963 set, where his rookie card is one of the highlights in a fairly mundane issue and notes his prior season's MVP honors. He also was featured in couple of Exhibit sets. 

Looks like he was in a bottom row for Fleer in '63 if this example is anything to go by:

Topps bought Fleer's baseball contracts out in 1966 after, I believe, the Major League Baseball Players Association under Marvin Miller tried to offer the the latter exclusive baseball card rights for several seasons for a fee of $600,000. This seems to have occurred after Topps appealed a reversal of the sole count they were dinged with in a Federal Trade Commission complaint brought by Fleer several years earlier. It's thought by some that their 1963 set was halted not by a Topps lawsuit but rather poor sales, so Fleer looks like they wanted no part of the market going forward, at least until a decade later. 

Wills seems like he was just had his contractual rights assumed by Topps and appeared in their sets from 1967 until he retired following the 1972 season. His 1967 Topps card is a nice one:

Some revisionist history occurred in the 1975 Topps set, where the MVP subset required the use of a player's card from their award-winning season, which led to this:

Topps also used that ersatz '62 Wills card when they prepared a set for K-Mart in 1982. Prior to that, they offered a mea culpa of sorts in their 1977 set with this card:

Ironic, eh?

Advertising Age

We'll be time-tripping to the 1940's this week folks, courtesy of some vintage trade magazine ads run by Topps.  BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd was (and is) offering these on eBay and while I snagged the one I wanted, the graphics on the others caught my eye for sure.

The March 1940 issue of International Confectioner magazine brought us this little beauty:

I won one of these displays a while back and it's a sweet piece, made of Bakelite:

Theres a blonde verison as well and it seems a lot harder to find than the black ones, which pop up from time to time (EDIT 3/19/21-that's beacuse it turns out the lighter colored version was made out of cardboard!):

The flagship Topps Gum spawned several amusing ads throughout the 40's, including this gem from the July 1945 International Confectioner, and the "Don't Talk Chum, Chew Topps Gum" slogan even lasted a couple of years or so past the end of World War 2, a testament to its selling power:

Exactly two years later Topps, in the same publication, was pushing their Gum as a "changemaker" on store counters across the globe

The 1948 Candy Buyer's Directory showed just how well the new slogan was working:

Change (groan!) was coming though, as this Candy Merchandising ad from December 1948 succinctly shows:

We've seen that SSI slogan before and sales of various Topps products were pretty much booming at this point. The "changemaker" catchword was still there though and would be for another year at least. 

Bazooka was really the flagship brand now but still only available as a nickel roll and Topps took a leap of faith introducing their first "novelty" product, Tatoo gum, as it wasn't clear at all to them if a competing penny product would harm the sales of the "Changemaker".  It seems like that's exactly what happened though and once Bazooka went to their own penny tab in mid 1949, Topps Gum started slowly fading away, undergoing a conversion to a chiclet style that was a staple of military rations for another ten years or so but increasingly a non-entity as a retail product.

I like how this ad backstops the initial 1948 date for Tatoo as some Topps PR blurbs indicate a 1949 debut (commonly accepted issue dates are 1948, then 1949 with its bigger wrapper and even then more subjects came in 1953). The 1949 issue with its redsigned wrapper that used graphical instead of textual application instructions, if I'm not mistaken, no longer appeared in the little round canisters Topps used in the first decade of their existence, instead residing in a square bin-style box. In fact,1948 Tatoo was the only Topps novelty (their first, not counting five cent Bazooka) I could find that came in the round style used by Topps Gum. 

I suspect Tatoo was actually perennial through 1954 or so, or very close to it. Topps issued a very hard to find set of generic Davy Crockett Tatoos in 1955 (possibly into early 1956) until new tatoo issues started appearing in 1957 as Popeye debuted a new line that would usually feature the hottest kiddie TV cartoon or comic book stars of the day.  This trend lasted yet another decade before fizzling out and giving way to a newer style once again at the end of the 60's. If you issued three essentially identical versions of a cheaply produced product over a five or six year period, it must have bene popular, so why stop selling it?

We Belong To The World

Some partial scans are better than others. Friend o'the Archive Peter Fishman unearthed this little beauty from his own archives recently and it's worth a look I think:

The dating is said to be 1956 and it's from a publication called The Candy Buyer's Directory, although I think the dating could be a smidge too late. I'll revisit momentarily.

Three things jump out at me with this ad. The first is the very clear message that Topps was an international concern.  Indeed, beyond their North American activities (Canada and Mexico came along quite early) they were making inroads in Europe, South America and even the Middle East (Israel was getting Topps products by the end of the 40's) and were looking well beyond those areas as well.

Second is the obvious promtional nature of the advert.  Topps was well-versed in cross promotion by the mid 1950's and would continue as the decades progressed.

Third, there is no mention of Bazooka, which is a little odd.  Clor-Aid Gum though is clearly on display and that leads me to our little dating conundrum. On March 4, 1954 The U.S. Second Circuit's Court of Appeals ruled that Topps was prohibited from using the Clor-Aid name as it infringed upon American Chicle's Clorets brand name and packaging.  The year before Topps had previously lost to that firm in marketing Topps Gum in a package that was to close to that of Chiclets:

Pretty darn close to a Chiclets package for sure!

With that, I think this ad is from early 1954, and also as below.

Present are a number of 1953-4 issues; putting aside the perennial Baseball, we have Wings, which was marketed in 1952-53,  World on Wheels (1953-54), Tatoo (a 1953 reissue), the 1953 version of License Plates, Who-Z-At Star (also 1953), Scoop (1953-54 but late 1953 and early 1954) and Tarzan, which was somewhere in the 1952-54 continuum (precisely where in those years is a bit of a mystery still for the two sets issued under this title but one seems almost certain to have been from 1953). Then we have the head-scratching World Coins which premiered in 1949 as a penny tab product and was reimagined as Play Coins of the World in 1950. Perhaps the international appeal of the original title was behind it's prominence, or maybe Topps had extra coins still to puch out the door.

Clor-Aid may have been intended to capitalize not just on the American market but also in French-speaking areas (France and Switzerland) as the court noted it sounds the same as Clorets in that tongue. But Topps got sued by American Chicle in 1953 for repackaging the re-imagined Topps Gum (again, they had previously tried to glom onto the Chiclets brand with packaging that was ruled too close for comfort) and while they were found to have copied the packaging, a trademark infringement suit failed.  American Chicle then appealed, leading to the March 4th judgement by the same judge that dinged them on the Chiclets affair. So it was an odd choice I think to use in in this ad.

We know Wings, which intriguingly had a Spanish Langauge version issued in Mexico (and possibly parts of South America) saw a tie-in with Doeskin Tissues and also with a brand of sneakers called Red Ball Jets in 1955, so maybe the ad was designed to burn off excess stock after all (and perhaps the ad resulted in those tie-ins!).  Maybe even an excess of chlorophyll gum nuggets found their way into some promotional scheme somewhere. 

Bonus Bazooka Blast!

It's a grab bag of Bazooka this week kids!  Here's some Bazooka eye candy I think you will all enjoy.

Wesley Morse drew Bazooka Joe comics for Topps for less than a decade (1954 debut) and then they figured out how to stretch is work even more after he died in 1963-his drawings ran until 1982!  It looks like he did some other work for Topps as well, take a gander at the line work and style on this envelope:

(courtesy Jeff Shepherd)

I'm not positive but I think the 2 cents US postage metered rate ended sometime in 1958, so this looks like a mid 50's envelope.  That traffic cop looks just like an amalgamation of Sarge and Herman from Bazooka Joe,  doesn't it?

I recently found a true date attribution for the Bazooka U.S. Presidents package design set.  It was described in Woody Gelman's Card Collector as a 1962 issue and I think in the few guides that covered it over the years but it's from 1960. That makes total sense given it was a presidential election year.

In 1969 Topps experimented with a foil Bazooka wrapper on what may have been a test of a nickel roll twin-pack (dig the markdown from Grant's), harkening back to the product launch in 1947:

I have no idea why they did this, nor why they brought back the sepia comics of yore:

Finally, on the heels of last week's waxy insert post, I thought I'd revisit this 1973 Bazooka comic inserts showing how Topps would sometimes gyp the kids with an ad instead of Bazooka Joe and His Gang:

Stay safe out there folks!

Roll The Presses!

UPDATE 4/10//20: SEE THE COMMENTS SECTION AND AN ADDENDUM BELOW FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON WHERE THE CARDS LOOK TO HAVE BEEN PRINTED  TOPPS WAS STILL MAKING UP THEIR OWN NARRATIVE FOR UNKNOWN REASONS WHEN IT CAME TO CARD PRODUCTION.

Well about a month ago I promised a look at the very strange time when Topps took their printing in-house and thanks to Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, I now have the pictures to prove it.

Topps Magazine, which lasted 16 issues and premiered the year prior, ran a feature in one of their 1991 issues detailing the printing of the then-current, 40th Anniversary Baseball cards. A large number of pictures were included and I've snagged some instructive ones to share here.

The article notes the Topps Art Department prepared everything to produce this 792 card set and then sent the films to Duryea for production.  So the art was all composed in Brooklyn at Bush Terminal then shipped out for printing.  As noted in the prior post about the various printers used by Topps over the years, the backs were once printed separately from the fronts, then trucked to the printer of the day to have the fronts applied.  Going by the article here, that may not have been the case anymore by 1991 but it's not clear.

Here are sheets hot off the press, ready for inspection:

The sheets passing muster (which must have been 99.99% of them) went off to the cutting and collating department, where the slitting machines did their thing:

The article goes on to say the cards went on to their coded boxes and then into to their coded cases, yielding the finished stacks o'wax seen here:

If you've ever wondered how many wax cases of cards fit on a skid, the answer is 24! I assume those above were about to be banded to avoid toppling over in transit. Alternatively, they could have been hand loaded, which if done correctly fills the shipping container to the point nothing would shift. I spent a couple of years working in a warehouse during college and spent time both stuffing and unstuffing containers by hand; oh, I put in my time with the banding gun too! It was a good, physical job-not too, too strenuous but enough that you got a pretty good workout most days.

I'm not sure but Topps could have bought those presses from one of the defunct printers that did their work over the years.  They don't look all that old and there were plenty of skilled printers around Pennsylvania to run these at Topps.  This didn't go on for long I don't think and marked a massive change from how their cards were printed over the previous decades but as transport costs rose, it does seem to have been a sensible solution.

UPDATE: AS NOTED BELOW IN A COMMENT, THE CARDS SEEM TO ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN PRINTED BY QUEBECOR IN PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND.  TOPPS WAS STILL FAKING IT IN 1991!

Tax Time

More NYC Municipal Archives tax photos today kids!  Unlike the post here last week featuring buildings that no longer exist, everything I am showing you today is still standing, although Topps is no longer in any of them except the last. I've posted more current pictures of these places before but since the Municipal Archives material is only readily available now I though I'd time trip a bit, so forgive any repetition.

Topps started life by renting a floor in the Gretsch Building at 60 Broadway in Brooklyn.  Mere blocks from the Williamsburg Bridge, this ten story building was where Gretsch Instruments manufactured some of their products.  The Shorin and Gretsch families seem to have known each other and in fact Morris Shorin bought a house on tony President Street from Fred Gretsch around 1920.

The "four Shorin boys" (Abram, Ira, Phil and Joseph) founded and ran Topps from the get go.  Morris either provided funding and/or was a silent partner until he died in 1947, having likely retired from the leaf tobacco business in 1938. They set up here right around the time this photo was taken, with a bunch of old machinery installed to make their first product, Topps Gum.

Dig that infrastructure either going up or coming down (I suspect the latter).  The other feature I see a lot in old pictures of Brooklyn and Manhattan are domes, like the one atop the building next to Gretsch. This is not the main view of 60 Broadway; it's mysteriously missing from the tax photos online.

By 1944 Topps appear to have their moved their executive offices out of the Gretsch Building, which was still their production floor in Brooklyn (they also had one in Chattanooga, Tennessee following the purchase of Bennett-Hubbard in 1943).  They ended up at 134 Broadway:

Right around this time they also purchased a local Brooklyn concern called Shapiro Candy, who were running things out of 383 3rd Avenue.  Topps would eventually run their Candy Division out of this building for a couple of years:

It's the building with the truck in front of it. There's a small, low-slung garage/loading bay attached to it, which you can see on the right just past the truck as your eye looks toward the vanishing point. It's funny how the trucks look pretty modern while you expect Murder Incorporated to jump out of the sedan passing by the building with tommy guns blazing.

By the middle of 1946 though, Topps had decamped to Bush Terminal, where they maintained production for the next twenty years.  Don't worry, they were still using all of their older spaces for storage during this period as well! Nothing got cleaned out of them until the Duryea, PA move in 1966. This is the 237 37th St. address on the right, with 254 36th St., where they expanded operations in the mid 50's to the left. I can't get the address locator to show the right building for 254 36th St., it keeps showing Building No. 4 (using Bush Terminal building numbering scheme) when I believe it should be No. 2. Their space at 237 37th St. was in  Building No. 1 by the way.

Topps kept their executive offices in Bush Terminal until 1996, when the moved to One Whitehall St. in Manhattan, upending 58 years of running things from Brooklyn. With production facilities moving to Pennsylvania in 1966, longtime art director Ben Solomon devised a series of codes to be used on production materials to keep track of what was going on with the various sets being put together in Duryea.  One Whitehall St. was only erected in 1962, so I had to go with a more with a recent picture as the 80's tax photos are horrible:

I used to occasionally visit One Whitehall as part of my job in the 1980's but that was before Topps moved in.  Word is they still have a trove of test issues up there, many unseen outside of a few select folks, just waiting for the right offer.  I would not put anything past this company, so who knows?

A New Freight City

I have no idea why but I started thinking about Bush Terminal this morning and decided to poke around a few of the more esoteric corners of the internet accordingly.


Bush Terminal was, as I've noted previously, quite a forward thinking idea for companies looking for a turnkey intermodal solution to ship out goods, back when the Port of New York was the biggest one in the land prior to containerization taking over in the 50's and 60's. Founded in 1902, this 1910 advertisement showed Irving T. Bush's grand idea in it's full glory:

The main part of the terminal was usually referred to as the Brooklyn Army Terminal while the eventual Topps offices and production facilities were housed in two of the buildings above the main complex, as seen in the upper left quadrant, in an area called Industry City:

 The two right-most buildings of the three shown in this detail, housed Topps, although they only had one when the moved in to the complex on June 1, 1946, a 237 37 St address, which is the right most building of this trio. Those shots are from the New York City Municipal Archives, although I nicked them from www.trainweb.org where the rail features are of interest.  See how they snake between the buildings?

This bucolic scene is from 1923. From The Brooklyn Public Library collection although I found it over at The Weekly Nabe site/blog.  You can see the Bush Terminal complex in the upper right:

1940 brought this view of things, with the Gowanus Expressway viaduct, apparently under construction, in focus:

Here's a look at the same stretch, albeit with a different orientation and widened considerably, from 2002, running right by the old Topps buildings. Thank you www.nycroads.com:

Woody Gelman and his carpool used to park under the viaduct. He probably walked in the front door here thousands of times. Fancy, huh?

Sorry, I don't recall who sent me that shot but it's of Mark Newgarden!  Looks like the sign uses the same Franklin Gothic Condensed inspired font used by Topps back in the day.

A concise early history of Bush Terminal can be found here if you are interested.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BLOG-10 years ago yesterday I made the first post here. Crazy!

Letters Perfect

A couple of items from the real Topps Archives today kids!

First out of the gate is a letter quite a few small fry would have received from Topps if they had written in to try and get a few baseball cards to complete their sets:

Sy Berger and his secretary are shown as the Reference Initials but Sy did not sign these letters, they just went out like this, maybe sometimes with an inside address and date. These were printed up in advance, my copy does not have typewriter key impressions, although the Topps Chewing Gum logo and contact information is embossed. Dating is tough but pre-1963 I would say, given the lack of a ZIP code and it seems likely it's from the early 60's.

Dating is not an issue for this next item, which is an internal memo that details a panoply of Topps bigwigs and their secretaries:

The bast part of this memo is that Woody Gelman annotated it (his handwriting is quite distinctive) so it could be filed away in an internal reference book. I don't have the attachments unfortunately but can guess that nos. 906 and 907 are rak and cello configurations, while item 988 is probably related to wax. Of course, I could be completely wrong!

Topps had clear delineations between their direct retail accounts and their jobbers (wholesalers) and in fact different unions handled shipments for each of these.  In addition there were tobacco and confectionery jobbers that were also solicited differently.

For you young 'uns, an addressograph was a way to address mailings using a machine of the same name.  It was quite the cumbersome process and you can read more about it here if you like.

The memo itself was a ditto, likely made on a spirit duplicator.  Those of us over a certain age can conjure up the smell of these immediately upon seeing one. It was pure methyl alcohol, by the way, that let off that smell so all you third graders back in the day were getting high every time you sniffed quiz papers!

All of this was a labor intensive process and when you start connecting the dots, you realize just how much product Topps had to move to make a profit.

Type Cast

The odd and unique stuff that comes my way takes many forms.  In addition to my collecting goal of having one example from every set sport and non-sport set Topps put out from 1948-80 (and sometimes one of each subset), I also pursue pieces related to the company proper. A little while back I acquired two "sorts" used by Topps for printing their stationery.  One was clearly heavily used to produce letterhead for the company, the other turned out to be a red herring.  Here is the letterhead sort (a "sort" being the entire unit used to typeset something):

This sort was heavily used, as you can see and appears have a copper plate affixed to a lead slug which in turn is affixed to a wooden block.  Here is a mirrored look at it:

I'm reasonably certain this was used to produce letterhead after World War 2 as the italic "incorporated " was not used prior to the war (the font used back then was more like the main font for "Topps Chewing Gum").  I've got a prior look at some stationery here.

Here is a pre-war letterhead from late 1940, signed by Abram Shorin no less; you can see the fonts are similar atop the piece:

A year later Topps had unincorporated and took a DIY approach, this time for a Philip Shorin missive:

I'm not 100% certain but believe they unincorporated so they would not subject to as much scrutiny once the war started and sugar and other staples and goods needed for their business became regulated. Eventually they cleaned things up a bit once the old supply was exhausted:

After the war the italic "incorporated" appears once Topps changed their ownership structure around 1947.  I would wager my sort was used to produce this stationery.  Other elements would be added as needed; the reference in the form letter below to pre-testing of Tatoo dates this specimen to 1948-49:  

That's an interesting lead paragraph as it may explain why Tatoo has a different style wrapper in 1949 from when it was first released in mid 1948. Tatoo of course was the first Topps novelty item. I wonder if the text instructions were changed to semi-graphic after the testing (scale is off, the wrapper on the left is from the original issue and is the same width but a little shorter than the one on the right):

 

The famous Topps testing procedures were firmly in place from the beginning!

Just for fun, here is another form letter for the 1949 World Coins issue, better known as Play Coins of the World:

Sy Berger also got into the act:

Sometimes the color element was omitted, as this 1952 letter shows:

The "Topps Chewing Gum" was still using the same typeface for the company name in 1959 but "incorporated" changed somewhere along the way, which means my little slug had been retired:

I don't think they changed to company name typeface until they moved to Duryea in 1966 and went with the much better curved logo.  Here is a stylized version from 1980:

I mentioned the other piece I obtained had a twist.  Here it is, it is a heavy steel item, quite suitable for a paperweight, which is what I am using it as:

The kids, the "profits from pennies" all make it seem like it belongs to "our" Topps but after a little research I first thought it was for the old department store of the same name.  More research however, shows that a trademark was granted to a Topps brand of motor oil under a filing by Plymouth Wholesale Corporation in 1962. That trademark included the phrase "profits from pennies" so I guess this piece is unrelated.