English Language Barrier

I used to frequently travel to London on business and would often marvel at the differences in phrases and words used to describe things when compared to comparable US jargon. In England, you don't have a backyard, you have a garden.  The Underground (aka the tube) is a subway in the U.S. and a subway there is a passage here. Crisps are chips and chips are fries, etc.  So it's no surprise that the English licensee and trade partner of Topps, A&BC Chewing Gum, sometimes used different nomenclature than their U.S. counterpart for similar products.

Take, for example, this 1965-ish A&BC Picture Card Album scanned by Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, which housed a youngster's Man from U.N.C.L.E.  card collection:

Props to the kid, as he properly put the periods after each letter!  A&BC (or, speaking of periods: A.& B.C.) was on board as well! Note how the album doesn't  have a glossy cover, just a cheap pulp one like the rest of the kit. That album-mounting lad is a somewhat, albeit not exactly, familiar image, seen here around 1956 in the U.S.:

And again a half-decade later, slightly livened up:

A&BC did issue an album that matches the US one above, slick cover and all (every A&BC album scan is from Lonnie going forward):

So what was a "Picture Card" album in the U.K. was a "Hobby Card" in the U.S. of A.  

The inside front cover was pretty informative.  Footballers and Cricketers would be pretty much foreign phrases to most American kids in 1965! Heck, even soccer was not all that well known at the time.

Here is a Cricketer example from 1959; A&BC issued another set in 1961 as well but for sheer poetry on a card, 1959 is the most Larkin-esque for sure:

The counterpart to cricketer in the US is "baseball player" which seems easy enough but take a look at the back of this card as it's illustrative of just how different things can be across the pond:

OK...England & Middlesex means he played for the National English team plus his "regular" club. And "over" is the delivery of six consecutive balls by the bowler.  "Bowler" is kind of like a Pitcher, except everything they deliver would be a balk on a baseball diamond, sort of . A "maiden" is a positive measurement but can mean a couple of different things and "Baseball Annie" is NOT equivalent! A "Wicket"...oh forget it, just take a look here, not that it will help much! 

Did I mention the 1961 issue was to commemorate a "test series" and that they can run up to five days? Well, it's nice enough anyway:

A&BC also offered "bespoke" albums for some sets, including one of their very earliest in 1954:

Flags Of The World also saw one, I believe from 1959, when the set debuted in the United Kingdom, although I note it was reissued, with smaller dimensions, in 1963 so either year is possible:

I suppose I shouldn't post this one but when you can get 7 cards for 6d (that's six pence, which we would call a penny in the states) it seems like a steal!

Plus there was a cool looking album!

Well all this typing has made me hungry.  I'm off to rustle up some biscuits, err.....cookies!

At A Premium

Here is my final look at the vintage years of Topps and O-Pee-Chee Hockey issues. This last look will focus on mail-in offers available from the wrappers and a sole insert offer.

In 1960-61 you could order a generic Topps Hobby Card Album, which Topps offered for years across various wrappers and product lines:

Before plastic sheets it was pretty much these or photo corners to display your cards:

I took a longer look at that album six years ago here.

1972-73 saw the first offer for the cardboard sports card lockers Topps (via OPC, there was no corresponding American offer) was famous for, now in a hockey only edition with only five wrappers and a buck standing between you and forever dinged corners on your cards:

The locker actually had some decent graphics, all things considered:

It was clear who designed this bad boy:

I think a few slight variations exist, as some seem to feature the hockey player with more shading.  1973-74 brought forth yet another locker, albeit with a bit of inflation factored in:

This one we have seen before as it covered all four major sports and came with the stickers to prove it:

 (Courtesy Harry Hoyle)

The parade of lockers is just beginning kids!

For 1973-74 you could order a nice NHL album as well. Do you think the kiddies were happy when they sent in $1.25 and got a 69 cent album in return?!:

Yes, that was from Dell in the U.S.  At a guess, O-Pee-Chee got them at retail prices!

1974-75?  Sports Card Locker.

The locker offered this season looked a lot like the one from two years prior but featured some updates to stay current and and featured almost the same front (four divisions now):



1975-76? Super Sports Card Locker:

Five bucks for a premium has to be some kind of record for the time! 

Snazzy, huh?  Topps offered these on a variety of sports product wrappers in the 1970's (and into the 80's, although the design changed). You can tell it apart from one offered in the early 80's by the curved Topps logo on top:

1976-77 ? Super Sports Card Locker (gotta be the same one, albeit two bits cheaper than last year's model):

You could also get an embroidered comic team patch (or crest) beginning in 1976, a promotion that like the lockers ran for a couple more years at least:

The patches are a bout four inches tall and all pretty much look like this:

Both the Super and regular locker premiums, plus even team apparel, would continue into the 1980's, although since we stop at 1980 most times here I'll leave those to the modernists as some of the premium daes are too far afield from the cards. I'm also not going to get into the remaining wrapper offers for these either as I feel like I'm just repeating things a bit too much, even by my standards.

As we saw a little while ago, there was an insert available in the 1978-79 O-Pee-Chee packs that pushed a product called Super Bazooka, with various premiums offered, the most germane of which was an All Star Poster:

Those last two scans are from Bobby Burrell's Vintage Hockey Collector Price Guide, which is THE hockey price guide as far as I am concerned. Bobby also runs the Vintage Hockey Forum, which I highly suggest visiting. The second edition is out now but I also recommend tracking down the first one as well as it's loaded with large color pictures of all sorts of hockey goodies. I use mine together as a set essentially.

That about wraps it up on the hockey frontier. I say "about" as there's a special treat coming up for you hockey fanatics.  Stay tuned.......

Album Oriented (W)rap

A football and hockey connection by way of Canada has now been found to the previously-posted-about Topps Hobby Card Album. "Found" is perhaps the wrong word; basically I just noticed this!

The 1960 Topps NFL Wrapper provides the first clue in this scan I nicked from Ebay:



If you look at the detail, you can see that you needed 35 cents and five Bazooka or Blony wrappers to a Brooklyn address to obtain an album:



So this was a premium from a Topps retail product that required wrappers from another product for fulfillment. This also explains the Blony connection to the album. The other panel from the wrapper has both US manufacturing and Canadian distribution (via O-Pee-Chee) information, so Topps was distributing the 1960 NFL cards in Canada as well.

It gets interesting from here on out though as Topps also issued a CFL set in Canada in 1960 with a similar wrapper as compared to the US version :





(Images taken from Collecting Canadian Football by Andy Malycky, well worth ordering -and quickly at that- if you are at all interested in CFL cards)

In Canada only Bazooka wrappers would work. as I believe Bozo brand bubblegum and not Blony was the second brand in Canada. Note the London, Ontario address for premium purposes.

Once football season ended, hockey fans could also get in on the fun:



(Image taken from Bobby Burrell's Vintage Hockey Collector Guide, still for my money the best visual trading card guide ever published).

If you click the hockey wrapper you will see the cards were imported into Canada from the US (as was the custom at the time) and and the Ontario address is still indicated as the place where your Bazooka wrappers could be sent.

We have a 1960-61 time frame potentially for production of the album but Topps was sending them from a St. Paul, Minnesota address later on so the supply clearly exceeded demand for many years.

I will be on the prowl for more Hobby Card Album ads and post my findings here as appropriate. I also want to get a timeline going for Brooklyn, St. Paul and Westbury NY (70's) premium distribution addresses.

Album Art

Generally speaking, if I own something discussed here I will use my own pictures or scans. Many times various Friends o'the Archive send along fabulous scans of cards and related pieces, many quite rare that I will use. Ebay is very useful for pictures of things I do not yet own or am not bidding on for various reasons. However, I just won an item that is too big for my scanner so I will have to use some pictures from the 'Bay, except from a different auction!

What is this gargantuan construct that has vexed me so? Why a Topps Hobby Card Album!

The album is designed to hold 208 cards standard sized cards. The cover will remind you of some earlier wrappings and trappings for the Trading Card Guild, so these must have been bouncing around the premium fulfillment warehouse for a good long time (more on this in a minute). The Topps shield logo is practically aboriginal. Here is the cover:



Measuring a whopping 8 7/8" x 12" this album featured heavy duty pre-slit black construction paper pages to provide state of the art storage:



There was a handy do-it-yourself checklist on the inside back cover:



And some history and instructions on using the album and checklist on the inside front:




The back cover limns more Trading Card Guild action:



Blony is listed along with Bazooka and the inside cover also mentions the "2 1/2" x 3 1/2" cards that are currently so popular" giving us a date no earlier than 1957 for the album's first appearance. The Ebay auctions refer to this as a 1967 issue; I am not sure when the supply was finally exhausted but Blony was discontinued in the early 1960's. It is plausible Topps sent out the albums after Blony died out until no more were left.

I have a comprehensive list of the baseball wrapper side panel ads for this period and the album does not appear on any of them. I have to believe it was offered on Bazooka comics and maybe on some non-baseball wrappers since clearly it was a by-request item. The album was certainly a mail in offer and four of them were apparently housed in this envelope from a Bazooka premium fulfillment warehouse:



Topps certainly did a lot to promote the growth of the hobby itself back in the day. I am also aware of some generic knockoff albums from around 1965 so there was some competition in the field.