America's Volume Dealer

As it often happens, I was searching the WWW for some obscure information about a certain Topps set and stumbled across some equally obscure information concerning an entirely different offering.  

In August of 2021, Robert Edward Auctions closed a lot of over 800 panels from the 1974 Topps Baseball Stamps set. Troves of these stamps have been found over the years, so this was no surprise but what caught my eye was the way these had been packaged, namely inside a vending box.  Here is the central image from the auction:

Those tight left end cuts are a hallmark of these panels, so that matches up perfectly with the zillions of known panels offered in the hobby press and online lo these past thirty years.  The panels, folded twice, matche how they were found in the test packs that also contained one of 24 team albums. That is also 100% on point.

The auction description mentioned the generic vending box was, in the opinion of REA, original to the panels. There is no mention of it being a Topps vending box and indeed, I haven't seen a similar one in many years of keeping track.  It does remind me a little of the circa 1949 vending boxes used by Topps to sell their tiny little cards like X-Ray Roundup but really since the early 1950's Topps had either used a semi-generic Trading Card Guild box - which came in two basic designs over about a dozen years, namely either black and red, or red, white & blue.  Topps switched to the much more familiar mostly-blue venders sometime in the 1960's. 

To refresh your collective memories, here is the generic 1949 vender:

Compare that to the graphics on this 1953 Trading Card Guild box, the first or second of a line that held cello packs of the larger Giant Size cards like Baseball and Wings. As readers here know, the Guild was just Topps rebranded when they sold early cello's without gum:

This is a slightly reconfigured version, apparently used for horizontally-oriented cards as it was said to contain 1955 All American Football cellos.

I'm not entirely sure how Topps sold their larger sized cards in a vending configuration.  They very well could have been in generic gray sleeves with no graphics evident, perhaps with just an end stamp indicating the product inside. But based upon later designs identifying the Trading Card Guild in the graphics, I would think Topps employed this color scheme in the early Fifties.  It's also possible any Guild boxes held loose Giant Size cards for vending, as Topps did this on occasion in the Seventies with their taller cards, but I cannot verify either point at this time.

UPDATE 9/25/23-Lonnie Cummins had sent me a scan of a gray box that likely held some configuration of 1955 Rails & Sails. It's stamped "TRAINS AND SHIPS":

A more familiar version of the vending box seems to have debuted around 1956, when Topps switched to the now standard size of 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" for the majority of their cards and even began indicating they were the company behind the Guild on some 500 count boxes. This one held Elvis Presley cards in a more traditional vending format.

Here's one that held 1957 Baseball, and we can tell from the stamped code using the Cummins Method that it was packed on May 9, 1957 by the third shift in Brooklyn:

At the same time, these started popping up, used when Topps was selling cello packs:

So as things got more colorful, a divergence occurred where Topps took responsibility for unwrapped vending boxes while the Trading Card Guild was shown as manufacturer of anything in cello form:

The red, white & blue boxes were used through at least 1966 as Monster Laffs packs from that year have been seen in them and I suspect the mostly blue boxes that replaced this version came came a bit after Topps moved production from Brooklyn to Duryea in 1966. Both styles probably overlapped as Topps transitioned their packaging when they killed off the Guild.

Somewhat of a case in point is this 1966 Baseball cello box:  

:

Note the new (at the time) curved Topps logo and a distinct lack of any displayable Trading Card Guild graphics, although the box bottom tells a different tale:

(Courtesy Dan McKee)

By 1968 the blues were certainly in use as this high number vending box shows:

(courtesy RR Auctions)

There is a Brooklyn address on the bottom but note it says "trading cards' which is still a Guild carryover.  At some point in 1975-76 this switched to "picture cards" as the 1975 Baseball vending was found in the older style while the 1976's came in this 500 count bad boy:

So anyway, I was talking about the 1974 Baseball Stamps, right? Well here is a parting tidbit from the August 20, 1974 issue of Sports Collectors Digest, some detail on where the set was tested:

Belmont is just a couple of miles west of Boston, a tried-and-true metro area for Topps testing purposes, along with Brooklyn and Duryea PA (plus a couple of other locales). I'm trying to ID a second test store in Brooklyn (one is already known) near 76th St and 20th Ave in Bensonhurst that was possibly called Pecker's and identified by Gary Gerani in his new and highly entertaining book The Card King Chronicles.

The one that is known is this store, which is long gone:

Another rumored one was on or just off Cortelyou Rd in Brooklyn (Flatbush to be exact) but I haven't been able to zero in any further.

Boxed Out

I don't look at basketball cards here too often, mostly due to the vintage era Topps sets being pretty homogenous and with one notable exception (the 1968 test issue) easy to obtain. Every once in a while though something hoops-related comes down the pike that surprises me.

A recent collectauctions.com auction, brought to my attention by Friend o'the Archive John Moran, contained a vending box of 1970 2nd series Basketball cards. But this was no ordinary vending box kids:

That zebra stripe pattern gives this away as a factory packed vending box. But it's not the ordinary flimsy blue rectangular box commonly used in this era by Topps, like this one from 1975: 

I have to say I've seen a lot of different styles of vending boxes over the years but never one using the wax pack box as the container.  Still, with the cards being oversized in 1970, it does make a fair bit of sense.

Here's how the box looks, top and bottom:

No posters here.....

For the record, Norm Saunders, who did tons of artwork for Topps, did the touch up work on the box art.

This method of vending distribution has me wondering how the "tall boy" issues in 1964-65 were packaged.  Does anyone out there have any examples of the Football and Hockey issues from those years that shows the vending boxes? 

Vend For Yourself

One of the early sales and marketing strategies employed by Topps centered on vending machines, or "automatic merchandising" as referred to in the trade.  Some of us would know of such machines from the glorious times of our misspent youth at the arcade (and I don't mean the video game arcade) or buying gumballs at the grocery store when Mom got her change at the checkout.

The use of coin operated vending machines to sell low cost merchandise dates back to Victorian times (the first one sold postcards) and in a more familiar way, the first gumball machine was introduced in 1907.  The use of such devices really took off following the invention of the cigarette vending machine in 1926 as this had the effect of allowing the large, established network of tobacco jobbers (wholesalers) in the US to branch out and distribute anything that could be sold where cigarettes were vended unattended.  For a company such as Topps, which had longstanding ties to the tobacco jobbers from the American Leaf Tobacco Company days, this was a boon to business as their gum could be sold alongside cigarettes in taverns and lunch counters by wholesalers they were familiar and comfortable with.

Topps sold their gum in non-automated displays as well but were players in the vending field as well before the war intervened.  After the war though, they fully embraced the use of such machines and in 1947 appointed Charles Zubrin, a key figure in their history, as supervisor of their vending program.  By 1949 they had created an entire Automatic Merchandising Division and named Zubrin as its Director of Sales and a year later he was the Merchandising Director of the division.  Soon thereafter Topps announced they had greatly expanded their distribution chain, adding many additional automatic merchandising jobbers to their already bulging roster.

The vending machines would initially sell Topps Gum tabs and Bozo gumballs but once Topps started making cards they also sold these on their own.  Amazingly, an old vending box from 1949 surfaced recently, as uncovered by Mickey's Sportscards.  This plain, unmarked box, held 500 tiny X Ray Roundup cards:

The above box, or more properly, sleeve held 500 cards and there were six in a larger carton, described as the same size as a cigarette carton.  That actually makes a lot of sense if Topps was trying to use a packaging form familiar to the tobacco jobbers.  The collation on these was quite poor; only about 30 different cards per sleeve and, oddly, over the entire "six pack" as well.  Yes, 3000 cards yielded about 100 of each example! I would estimate the above box would be the earliest form of vending packaging used by Topps as only a couple of sets predate X Ray Roundup.

There was an earlier vending find of these a few years ago, albeit without any boxes being mentioned and a sampling is shown below:

The more familiar form of packaging for these cards was a Pixie gum pack:

It looks to me that the red "X Ray developing paper" used to decode the back of the card is packaged on top of the card proper.  The inner wax wrapper holding the gum was dark green on the examples I have seen; the outer wrapper is plain paper:

X Ray Roundup sold well but a final print run may have led to overproduction after the marketplace was saturated and probably led to a number of vending sleeve returns. Comic book ads from 1949 touted the fact you could purchase small groups of these cards from Topps for fifteen cents, which came with a small plastic viewer to decipher the back. The original developer, as you may have surmised, was flimsy cellophane, as evidenced by this ad:

There is a related set of stamps, which will be commented upon separately, as therein hangs a tale.....