Let's Get Ready For Adventure

No, not the 1956 Gum Products set that often gets attributed to Topps (it's actually from the same manufacturer that issued the 1941 Double Play cards) but rather this rather bizarre repackaging of Ben Solomon and Woody Gelman's Triple Nickel Books, previously covered here and here.

I stumbled across an eBay listing with these quite by accident but it adds yet another layer to the rich, dense cake that was Card Collectors Company, namely the Teen-Age Adventure Library (remember, Arthur Benwood is an anagram of Ben & Woody, while Arthur may have been a nod to Arthur Shorin):

I'm not sure if these are missing covers but I don't think so. Here's how they originally looked when issued in the 50's:

And here's the indicia from the inside front cover of the original book:

Here are the backs of the Teen-Age Adventure Series pamphlets, with indicia all included, indicating they came without a true cover:

Here's a better look:

I can't swear I've seen entries in the Card Collectors Company catalogs for anything like this-they may have just advertised them in Boys Life and maybe some comic books.  I doubt many have survived given how fragile these look.

The eBay listing from seller fieryfb states:

These are another series with no connection to the Mel Lyle books. This earlier Power Boys series involves Ted and Steve Power, who are boy reporters on their fathers small town newspaper who become involved in mysteries similar to the Hardy Boys. Some of these (such as the two listed for auction) were published by The Card Collectors Company as fairly plain pamphlet like books, while some were printed by Triple Nickel Books with higher quality paper and full color covers. As far as I can tell, a total of 5 Power Boy books were actually published - the other 3 being  Riddle of the Sunken Ship, Castle of Curious Creatures, and Mystery of the Marble. There are also 2 "phantom" titles; the Mystery of the Aztec Archer and The Secret of Canyon Creek.

The Mel Lyle books referred to featured a different set of Power Boys who headlined a handful of books in the mid 60's. I'm not sure of the assertion that some of the Power Boy Titles from Triple Nickel Books were phantoms, more research is needed.

This is one of those neat little byways in the history of Topps and Woody Gelman.

March Mix

Some more odds and sods today kids, showcasing some rarely seen, albeit not particularly valuable, Topps items.

Let's commence with a double of a triple!  After Topps bough Bowman out in early 1956, they continued issuing Blony bubble gum (and probably some other legacy confectionery products) in to 60's and even tried to revive it in the 70's. At a guess it was probably intended for sale mostly in the Philadelphia area and suburbs, maybe down into the Chesapeake, and likely encompassing old, defensive Bowman jobber territory.  Blony was wrapped with Archie comics for a few years in the mid to late 50's and this example is a prime one:

Mirthful comic aside, the real star here is the offer for Triple Nickel Books, which were a Woody Gelman and Ben Solomon production.  Talk about your cross promotion!

An old series of threads on Valentines Day issues showed a single example of the 1962 Valentine Stickers Topps produced for this once annual offering in 1962.  A recent eBay auction, which I happily won, provides visuals for three more stickers, plus a peek at the reverse.  These are very, very hard to find, no doubt partly due to the stickers being used for their intended purposes, namely being peeled off and applied to a plain sheet of paper for a low cost "card". However, they are so much harder to find than just about any other sticker issue from the 60's, I have to think they were not widely distributed and suspect Topps may have pawned off one of their Funny Valentine issues from years prior as well in '62. I hesitate to call my look at these a Visual Checklist since only four color shots are known to me (there is a B&W example of a fifth sticker in the Sport-Americana Non-Sports Guides as well). You can go over to Todd Riley's http://non-sport.com/ and find examples of all of 44 them I believe, as I'm not copying images out to populate a checklist.

Here are the three:

The backs are tan, which is expected but nice to actually see:

1967 Giant Plaks box flat anyone?

That's the ten cent version that held packs with two plaks of the thinner variety (vs. the thicker ones sold in five cent packs) and it's a set not a lot of people really follow, but at the bottom right of this proof box slick is a very interesting stamp:

As documented a while back, Chromographic Press was another Topps printer, but it was family owned (by P. Peter Shorin) and I believe it printed mostly oddball issues, a moniker the Giant Plaks richly deserve but this is a mere box flat, so who knows if I'm right. It was shut down prior to the original Topps IPO in 1972 and probably was started up in the early 60's.

See ya in April!

Steve & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Whoever said there's nothing new under the sun must not have been very inquisitive.  We are rolling through our ninth year here and I still find stuff on a regular basis that I haven't seen before. Today brings a melding of the venerable, albeit erstwhile, Exhibit Supply Company (ESCO), and Soloman & Gelman, the small commercial art studio that morphed into the Creative and Art departments at Topps.

I've written previously about Triple Nickel Books, a line of paperbacks put out in the 1950's by Ben Solomon and Woody Gelman. These 15 cent softcover stories seem to follow two lines of characters: historical ones like Davy Crockett and Wild Bill Hickok, and 'tween adventurers/sleuths such as Barbie Lane or the Power Boys.

The Power Boys seem to be the most popular part of the series, which ran to about fifteen books overall, near as I can tell, and the Power Boys were the subject of at least eight of them.  Here's a representative cover:

The author is Arthur Benwood, which is an amalgam of Ben and Woody's first names.  It's not clear if they wrote the Power Boys stories or were just being clever with the pseudonym.  Like any serious line of books aimed at the youth of the country, an advertising and marketing campaign had to be developed. One approach taken by the Triple Nickelers was to use the back of 1950's Exhibit cards. Check out this Walt Dropo, provided by Friend o' the Archive Glen over at Net54:

Isn't that something?!  You can see the Mystery of Marlow Mansion title in the ad to boot. Compare to the back cover of a standard Triple Nickel (yet again referring to the title above):

It's worth noting that while a later series of hardcover books also known as The Power Boys, published in the mid 1960's, was unrelated to the previous incarnation, the father of the latter brood was called Thomas, so maybe the author (Mel Lyle) took inspiration from the past in a way.

A Stan Musial Exhibit with Triple Nickel advertising also is known; the ad back is rare even among the universe of scarcity that defines Exhibit backs of the era.

Rubbing Three Nickels Together

One of the things I can't get a firm grip on is when Ben Solomon, longtime Topps Art Director, and Woody Gelman, their longtime Creative Director, joined the company. Both men had worked together since the late 1930's, when Ben was an animator at Fleischer Studios and Woody an aspiring assistant.  After their stint at Fleischer's, where Ben made his mark directing Popeye shorts, the immediate postwar years found them in an art agency named, prosaically enough, Solomon & Gelman.

(courtesy Jerry Beck)

Here they did high quality work in the decade before photography took over the advertising world and their work on a campaign for Popsicles got the attention of Topps President Joseph Shorin around 1950-51.  After doing some work for Topps, Shorin allegedly told the two that unless they came to work for him, he would give all his work to another agency.

I think Woody came into the fold first; he worked with Sy Berger (at Sy's apartment) in late 1951 on the iconic 1952 Topps set, which was critical to the firm's future and I have seen references he was working in their offices by 1953.  Ben however, is harder to trace and may not have been full time at Topps until the early 1960's.  It's also possible Solomon & Gelman was brought in house and allowed to retain some autonomy so long as their work did not interfere with their jobs at Topps.

The firm may have been active as late as 1965 but one thing is certain, the produced a series of fifteen cent soft covers for "young adults" called Triple Nickel Books in 1955, a line that was active for three or four years. It would appear their timing was excellent as the first two Triple Nickels featured Davy Crockett.  Here is the cover of the second one:

That approved reading logo is a bit frightening and likely was due to the imposition of the Comics Code Authority in 1954-55; many publishers would have to adapt due to the changes occurring in what could be sold to America's youth following a series of Congressional hearings.  The CCC gave us Mad Magazine but in reality was just a bunch of hooey that disrupted many livelihoods.

Here is what it looked like inside, typical 50's sub-teen fare really:

The inside front cover is where we get the publishing details, which I will blow up for easy reading:

We also get a bonus as the the artist's name is shown below the Davy Crockett illo: Mort Leav. I am thinking, looking at that b&w Davy Crockett illustration and comparing it to the cover painting, which it looks like he did as well, that Leav or someone else at S&G, did some work for Topps in the 1950's.  Look at this Round-Up card compared to the next Triple Nickel Book cover of Wild Bill Hickok:

Nat Wilson may have been a pen name for Ben & Woody; I'm not 100% sure of that but another author in the series, Arthur Benwood, has a name that is clearly derived from an amalgram of Ben and Woody's first names.

Here are some other exciting books in the series, from an ad on the inside back cover:

And what 50's moralizing would be complete without a panel of experts giving approval:

Topps would issue two fan magazines in 1965 that took some inspiration from Triple Nickel Books but I think the series ended in 1957.  Ben & Woody however, had greater days ahead at Topps.