Bang On A Can

There are still some amazing things popping up when it comes to Topps.  I've posted about several different 1940's Topps Gum displays previously, with a good summary found here. If you click that link and scroll down, you will see a traditional cardboard Topps Spot Display that measures about two inches high and held 100 gum tabs.  I've now landed an entirely different beast, namely one made of mild steel:

It's a smidge under 4 inches tall and quite heavy.  It could easily have doubled the gum load held by the cardboard version and then some. This metal version's visuals are similar to the 1946 cardboard graphics; earlier canisters, some with foil highlights and some without, are dated 1942 and mention "Only Natural Flavors". There's at least one later version as well but I don't have any dated past 1946 here at the main Topps Archives Research Complex. The seller obtained it from a collection in Syracuse, New York but he didn't know any history of it beyond that.

Topps had to use some artificial ingredients as WW2 raged on, so I'm not exactly sure when they switched over from "Only Natural Flavors" to "Take Your Change" but believe it was either during the latter part of the war or just after it ended and this motto clearly ties to their Changemaker ad and PR campaign that went into overdrive after the war.  

Yes it's rusty!

I mentioned opening earlier, didn't I?  Well you needed a key to open these and Topps handily sent one along for the ride.

Another key certainly opened this bad boy up, perhaps from the same shipment. Well guess what, the day after I received my metal can, another popped up on eBay, albeit from a different seller and sans affixed key, which obviously got used as intended.  This one though, still had the lid, although it had been keyed:

I'm about 99% sure the example with the lid was being offered by a store a little to the Southeast of Cleveland. Both of the known metal canisters seem to be connected to the old Rust Belt/Great Lakes area then, which is interesting given the packaging and Topps' connections to a printer or two in the Great Lakes vicinity. The heaviness of the can though seems at odds with Topps micro-managing the shipped weights of their products in the 40's as they had razor thin margins on their penny confections.

This may all show details of an old Topps jobber's distribution route but it's not really clear and another one of my guesses as to its market tends toward military or similar rough use.  Shipboard in the Navy or on display at a foreign PX somewhere seems to make sense but I just don't know.   All I know is I had never seen one before and now two popped up within ten days of each other!

We Have A Winner

BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd recently sent along what are the oldest Topps trade ads I have seen. What's below hails from March 1940, a mere 15 months or so after the company was founded.  We get a nice look at one of the bakelite Topps Gum counter displays in this piece of puffery:

That gum display is quite interesting to me as it shows the Ginger flavor and also helps date that particular tab.  Shep and I think it was replaced or overtaken by Pepsin soon after launch and you can find that flavor plus the Spearmint, Peppermint and Cinnamon varieties in tab form somewhat easily, same with their wrappers.

I've never seen the display rack variant on the left before; these are made of bakelite:

As an aside, I own a tab of the Ginger that Shep thinks may be the only one in existence:

The New York City wrapper variant probably dates to 1939 then but I can't be 100% sure as the indicia of the ones in the display obviously can't be seen.  Still, it's a good bet. We also get a peek at a vending box sleeve, where 55 tabs of refreshing Topps Gum resided until slipped into a display.

60 Broadway, which is the Gretsch Building, was the first Topps production floor. They didn't vacate the premises completely until 1965 despite moving their offices twice in Brooklyn before decamping to Duryea, Pennsylvania in 1966. They used it as warehouse space once they took more space just down Broadway a short time later.

The economics of the time are quaint but those little extras, like five extra pieces of gum per vender, were a big part of the Topps sales strategy.

The Dimes,They Are A Changin'

Some pieces from an old Huggins & Scott auction give some insight into how aggressively Topps marketed products, even when they were on the cusp of obscurity.

By 1949 Topps Gum, the one cent, flagship confection for the company since its founding in 1938 was being supplanted at a rapid clip by Bazooka. Nicknamed the "Changemaker" in a clever sales PR campaign, the transition into a Chiclets style candy coated gum nugget was underway by the time penny tabs of Bazooka were introduced in '49. But you could not tell this by looking at some of their promotional materials for the year.

I can't quite make out the date but the below order sheet was included in a lot with other items from 1949, although the canister style makes me think it could be slightly earlier. Nonetheless, it shows the Changemaker nomenclature:

An order sheet with a date of March 12, 1949 is interesting on a couple of fronts.  You can see there is a Bazooka option along with the Topps Gum option. Bazooka was still only sold in five cent packaging at this point as the penny tabs did not show up until around October. More Changemaker verbiage comes through to boot but the highlight for me is the Consolidated Merchants Syndicate logo.  The syndicate brought together over 3,000 retail stores in a network that was almost certainly outside of Topps' old tobacco jobbers:

Here is a better look at the logo:

Need a point-of-sale decal?  No problem!

There are many variants of that penny canister. I know of foil and cardboard versions copyrighted 1942 and a foil one with a 1946 copyright.  I'm not sure if a 1949 version exists but it could as the one in this old subway ad remnant sold by Lelands a while ago is akin to the graphic on the CMS sheet:

There were still good years left for Topps Gum once it went over to the "nugget" side, although it was mostly distributed as part of US Military rations into the late 1950's.

I'm working to document all of the gum and canister styles Topps used from 1938-49 but it's an evolving project as so many variants keep popping up.  I've been using some Trademark and Patent databases but not all of the information on the brand seems to be available online.  So I'll keep posting here as new items present themselves.

Placement Service

BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd passed along an old ad featuring an item from my favorite confectioner a short time ago. Sometime in the 1940's the Bakelite Corporation (really Union Carbide) took out a trade ad featuring an old Topps Gum display.  I think it looks pretty cool as the colors of the Topps display and gum really stand out:

Bakelite was essentially an early form of plastic, a bit more brittle than the stuff we are used to today. Shep says it's the first time he's seen one of these displays other than in darker colors.

Here's a better look at the Topps display:

Here is one of the aforementioned darker displays:

That display was auctioned along with the other type of counter display used by Topps, the round canister:

All these displays date from around 1946-47 I would say as the canister has a 1946 copyright.

Display Case

On of the neater Topps Gum pieces I have ever seen came across my radar recently, namely a bakelite counter display which held columns of Topps gum:

A small circular piece is missing at the right top (and possibly two are gone from the bottom) but it looks in fine shape otherwise. The gum tabs are described as the 1946 versions so the display looks to be a post-World War 2 piece.  Topps had patented a similar wooden display case about five years earlier so I guess this was the natural progression.

Can you spot the lone gum tab that is not Peppermint or Spearmint?