Window Treatment

The advertising materials used by Topps in the early days of card and novelty production were quite varied.  Television was not yet entrenched in homes when the first Topps sets started coming out in 1948, so radio and print ads were really the two biggest methods available. Topps would provide their jobbers with advertising materials to be passed on to the retailers to help sell product and the earliest example I can find comes from 1949-a window display for Flip-O-Vision:

There are some big stars used to entice the kiddies to spend their nickels: The Marx Brothers, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are still well-known today and Burns & Allen, Johnny Weismuller and Margaret O'Brien would not be far behind.  Kay Kyser though, the bespectacled middle aged gentleman above Harpo and Chico, would not be a name known to many.  Kyser was a bandleader in the swing era who had a TV show that was enjoying some popularity in 1949 but just a year after this set came out, he walked away, never to return.  He eventually ended up becoming President of the Worldwide Church of Christian Science.

Four years later Topps had taken the muted tones of 1949 and turned them into the bright colors of 1953:

Color movies had started to appear more frequently by 1950 so bold colors were showing up more and more in Topps packaging and ads.  This took another 22 years to reach its logical conclusion, when the crazy quilt 1975 Baseball window display was unleashed on an unsuspecting public:

The Topps Sports Club has been covered here previously but the use of the window display to push yet another Topps product is a little brash, no?

Animalistic

Topps was in the midst of a fabulous run of sensationalized subject matter on their cards in 1950-51: after Hopalong Cassidy had been introduced, the company issued a lurid set of 100 cards entitled Bring 'Em Back Alive, which depicted fantastic jungle scenes allegedly encountered by the explorer Frank Buck and then the multi-series Freedom's War, with all sorts of explosions and mayhem depicted.  Bowman was also issuing similar cards (Red Menace) in this time frame.  Then came a lengthy protest from a group called New York Veterans for Peace, a letter writing campaign from large numbers of concerned mothers, some negative publicity in the press and before you knew it Freedom's War and Red Menace were yanked from the shelves by their respective manufacturers, each at least a series shy of completion and much to the chagrin of each firm as enormous profits were wiped out almost overnight.

While intolerance and censorship are nothing new, they do make companies  react.  Bowman had made their mark after World War 2 with a number of sets depicting the carnage and violence created by man and Topps was never a company to shy away from salacious material; there are bare chested women depicted, National Geographic style, in Bring 'Em Back Alive after all but there were lots of parents who controlled lots of allowances and they would not be given fresh ammunition by Topps, at least not immediately.

In the wake of the Freedom's War debacle, Topps president Joseph Shorin announced they would cancel any more orders and come out instead with a second series of Frank Buck cards.  Today we know that a series called Animals of the World ended up assuming the numbering of Bring 'Em Back Alive, depicting one hundred very tranquil looking beasts, all taken from artwork by an artist named Mary Baker.  Take a look at a Bring 'Em Back Alive example first:

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That is a typical example from the set and not even the most shocking one.  Now compare to a typical Animals of the World card:

That is actually one of the more action packed examples from this set.  Quite a difference, no?

Let's look at the backs, BEBA first then AOTW:

Note the wording about "This Series" near the bottom of the AOTW card. Since there was no first series, we have to rely upon what Joseph Shorin said about a follow up to Frank Buck.  Now, this is not the point of today's post, despite the long winded wind up.  What piqued my curiosity today was an item description in the 1989 Topps/Guerney's auction catalog concerning original Animals of the World artwork, which states:

"ANIMALS OF THE WORLD

These 11 full color paintings are the originals produced in 1949."  The picture accompanying the lot looks like this:

Those look pretty close but not identical to Bring 'Em Back Alive but in no way, shape or form depict subject matter from Animals of the World!  Take a look at these Net54 Vintage Non Sports Club gallery pages (BEBA here and AOTW here) and see for yourself.  That ostrich in the lower left corner is scary looking!

So what happened?  I'm not really sure but suspect that Topps could not obtain licensing for a second series of cards from Buck's estate, then for some reason halted production of the artwork for the second series and instead went with Mary Baker's paintings, which were well-known as part of a children's book, instead.  This could have been done to save money but I think it probably was instead foisted on the public to show all the alarmed Moms of the world what good, wholesome eggs they were down at Topps.

Good News Bad News

As luck would have it, I was perusing some old NYC/Brooklyn books yesterday and spotted, in plain view, a picture of the building that housed Morris Shorin's American Leaf Tobacco Company in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  That's the good news. The bad?  It's a low-res shot and it was taken a little before ALTC would have moved in.

Morris Shorin (Chigorinsky at the time), I am 99% convinced at this point, was making and selling cigars and other tobacco products in partnership with a man named Metz (or Melz) from at least 1905-07 before obtaining a loan and starting the American Leaf Tobacco Company in 1908, possibly reviving the name of a firm that had probably shut down a couple of years earlier.  I would really like to get the story of the whole ALTC history firmed up but need access to some information that itself needs to be tracked down.

Chigorinsky and Metz operated out of a building at 140 Throop Avenue on the bustling Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant border (and which was possibly the prior location of ALTC in the 1890's). This would have been an ideal spot for a tobacconist's shop and was located quite close to where the family lived at the time. What is known is that sometime between 1908 and the summer of 1917 (probably much closer to the former rather than latter date) the ALTC moved to 7 Debevoise St in Williamsburg, just a couple of blocks away from 140 Throop Avenue.  This too would have been prime retail territory but the building would also have facilitated a second story business; possible retail and wholesale operations were undertaken at the same time.  Two stories of apartments comprised the 3rd and 4th floors.

Located down the street from a huge vaudeville theater and next to a cafe, 7 Debevoise St was captured in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle Post Card around 1906.  I found the shot in a great book by Richard L. Dutton called Brooklyn:  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Postcards 1905-07 and have cropped out the building to show here (twice, as I have tried to enhance the picture). I am not sure if that second story sign (which I cannot yet decipher but might say Can Can) was for #7 or #9 (building to the right of this one).  While not quite an ALTC shot, I'm getting closer!

Here is the wide angle shot reproduced in the book-it has more detail when not blown up:

State Of Confusion

Perhaps the Summer of Love vibes were strong enough to reach Duryea, PA in 1967 but the Comic Pennant insets that came in that year's football packs were enough to make one think some banana peels must have gotten mixed into the Mac Baren at Topps HQ  How else can one explain the downright groovy sayings that adorn this 31 subject insert set?

Here is a prime example of one of the team oriented cards-note how the snarky saying is wedged in there:

The back is pure period tan sticker back:

We'll come back to the back in a minute. Topps only had AFL rights in 1967 so the nine teams in the league such as Oakland -- "(Fat People in) Oakland (are Usually Icebox) Raiders" -- were rounded out in the Comic Pennants with a couple of college-themed stickers suck as "Notre Dame (Hunchback Of)" and a whole lot of amusing and borderline offensive sayings such as "Down With Teachers" or "Nutstu U."  There was also a "Confused State" and my personal favorite:

It's hard to tell but that is actually a card and not a peelable sticker.  Look at the Jets sticker and you will see the score line where the sticker was meant to be peeled.  The card version is also lacking the "Peel Off Pennant Carefully" line.  The back of the card sure look sticker-stock-like but it's cardboard and not the usual tan backing paper:

To make matters even more confused, Beckett states that there is a style in "adhesive form with the pennant merely printed on card stock".  Well, if true that makes three types but I am thinking they thought the cardboard version had a sticker back, hence the, ah, confusion, but maybe there is a third version.

The stickers were allegedly withdrawn due to their outrageous sayings, which theoretically accounts for their scarcity but it is possible the short, 132 card AFL set also did not remain on the shelves all that long.  Yanking the stickers would seemingly make another type of insert necessary and there is no other option in '67. The stickers do seem offensive in many respects and I am thinking two could have been pulled prior to distribution (33 would be an expected set count for standard-sized stickers) so it is possible I guess but definitely not a given. The cardboard version is also stated to have been sold on its own; no pack exists to my knowledge but it could have been a fun pack item in such a scenario. 

Who Ya Callin' Short?!

The earliest piece of true hobby research I ever pulled off was in the early 1980's, when I sussed out a black & white picture in an old hobby magazine of a 1967 Topps high number sheet.  I did this because the accompanying article mentioned it showed the Brooks Robinson card (at the time thought of as the ne plus ultra of all short prints) as a double print on the sheet.  Well, I thought to myself, that's odd, and then with the help of a magnifying glass and a team checklist book, pieced together all 132 cards on the sheet and then typed it all up (yes, on an ancient device called a typewriter) and tucked my schematic away.  I am glad I did that as I lost the original picture sometime later, although I have since found other examples of it, like so:

That is described as the "B" sheet, which means it was on the right side of the full 264 card sheet; the "A" sheet would have been to the left, although I think they were actually printed in a horizontal orientation.  Pay attention now, there will be a quiz at the end and you will have to use math! After years of relative stability in their printing patterns, Topps started mucking around with things in 1967 (Edit 5/29/19-looks like starting in 1965). Counting from 1961, the first year of expansion in baseball, their set lengths were 587, 598, 576, 587, 598, 598 again (1966), then 609, before dropping back to 598 in 1968, the final year before another MLB expansion would occur and set sizes would grow beyond anything ever seen before.

Topps also had consistently printed additional cards on each press sheet when compared to the checklist cards in this period, thereby giving the purchaser some cards from the next series plus the checklist card for the following series (in what was technically the prior series pack) and ensnaring their young consumers in a ceaseless march to the last series of the year where the extra cards and checklists would elegantly resolve.  But in 1967 they changed how they did this and also went over the 600 mark for some reason, which is not entirely clear and was not supported by their being more teams or players. The was also a distribution problem with the 1967 high numbers and many locales did not receive them, especially west of the Mississippi River. Add it all up and you have a recipe for scarcity.

Now, getting back to the uncut high number sheet.  While the above scan is truncated at top and bottom, if you count the descending rows and use DP for double print and SP for single print, you can label them as: DP1, DP2, DP3, DP4, DP5, DP1, SP1, SP2, DP2, DP3, DP4, DP5. The odd placement of the two SP rows has always caught my eye and led me to think something was afoot but eventually I forgot about this happenstance.

Well we have to jump ahead a few years, to when I found a list of 1967 high number DP's in The SCD/Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards. They had DP's where I had SP's.  I then checked one of the Beckett books and found their list did not mesh with mine either.  I e-mailed Beckett and got a response that their DP listings had been created by direct observation of a (possibly partial) uncut sheet.  The source of SCD's listing was never revealed to me but it seems now it was based upon tabulation data and not an uncut sheet.  It was clear though that Beckett had access to a sheet that was different than the one I had sketched out.  So I created a spreadsheet to show all the possibilities and came up with something quite interesting:

		SUBJECT	B SHEET	SCD	BECKETT
531		7TH SERIES CHECKLIST			DP
534		BAUER	SP	DP	DP
535		CLENDENON
536		CUBS ROOKIES (J. NIEKRO)
537		ESTRADA		DP	DP
538		MARTIN
539		EGAN	SP	DP	DP
540		CASH
541		GIBBON
542		A'S ROOKIES (MONDAY)	SP	DP	DP
543		SCHNEIDER
544		INDIANS TEAM
545		GRANT
546		WOODWARD
547		RED SOX ROOKIES	SP	DP	DP
548		GONZALEZ		DP	DP
549		SANFORD
550		PINSON		DP	DP
551		CAMILLI		DP	DP
552		SAVAGE	SP
553		YANKEES ROOKIES	SP
554		RODGERS	SP	DP	DP
555		CARDWELL
556		WEIS	SP	DP	DP
557		FERRARA
558		ORIOLES ROOKIES (BELANGER)	SP
559		TRACEWSKI		DP	DP
560		BUNNING
561		ALOMAR
562		BLASS	SP	DP	DP
563		ADCOCK	SP
564		ASTROS ROOKIES	SP	DP	DP
565		KRAUSSE
566		GEIGER		DP	DP
567		HAMILTON (YANKEES)
568		SULLIVAN	SP
569		A.L. ROOKIES (CAREW)		DP	DP
570		WILLS
571		SHERRY
572		DEMETER
573		WHITE SOX TEAM
574		BUCHEK
575		BOSWELL
576		N.L. ROOKIES
577		SHORT
578		BOCCABELLA
579		HENRY
580		COLAVITO
581		METS ROOKIES (SEAVER)	SP
582		OWENS		DP	DP
583		BARKER (YANKEES)
584		PIERSALL
585		BUNKER
586		JIMENEZ	SP
587		N.L. ROOKIES
588		KLIPPSTEIN	SP	DP	DP
589		RICKETTS		DP	DP
590		RICHERT
591		CLINE	SP
592		N.L. ROOKIES
593		WESTRUM
594		OSINSKI
595		ROJAS
596		CISCO	SP	DP	DP
597		ABERNATHY	SP
598		WHITE SOX ROOKIES
599		DULIBA		DP	DP
600		B. ROBINSON		SP
601		BRYAN	SP		DP
602		PIZARRO
603		A'S ROOKIES	SP
604		RED SOX TEAM
605		SHANNON
606		TAYLOR
607		STANLEY	SP
608		CUBS ROOKIES		DP	DP
609		JOHN

The 7th series checklist also appeared on the 6th series press sheet, so is more abundant in theory than any other 7th series card but we'll treat it as a true high for our exercise here today.  If you look at the data you will see that 11 cards identified as short prints have no corresponding DP designator from either SCD or Beckett.  Logically, these 11 cards are the true 1967 high number short prints and they are all from the row I call SP2:

552 Savage
553 Yankees Rookies
558 Orioles Rookies (Belanger)
563 Adcock
568 Sullivan
581 Mets Rookies (Seaver)
586 Jimenez
591 Cline
597 Abernathy
603 A's Rookies
607 Stanley

Conversely, 11 cards that are in my SP1 row are Double Prints on both the SCD and Beckett lists (I suspect #601 Bryan, a Yankee, was left off the SCD list inadvertently):

534 Bauer
539 Egan
542 A's Rookies (Monday)
547 Red Sox Rookies
554 Rodgers
556 Weis
562 Blass
564 Astros Rookies
588 Klippstein
596 Cisco
601 Bryan

Then there is the curious case of the 11 cards shown as DP's in the other two lists and also on my sheet:

537 Estrada
548 Gonzalez
550 Pinson
551 Camilli
559 Tracewski
566 Geiger
569 AL Rookies (Carew)
582 Owens
589 Ricketts
599 Duliba
608 Cubs Rookies

A nice, neat 11 cards and all appearing in the row I have dubbed DP1. The next three rows (DP2, DP3, DP4) are not designated by either price guide but I have them as DP's.  Beckett, if using a partial sheet, may not have caught these and SCD just doesn't mention them.  I have them all as DP rows in order to make the Beckett sheet work,

Did you notice all three of these "odd" rows (DP1, SP1, DP2) appear as a single grouping on my sheet? Let's replicate them at the top of a theoretical second sheet:

DP1
SP1
SP2

Still, what of Brooks Robinson?

SCD has him as an SP and the old thoughts on Brooks were based upon a vending box hoard's yield many years ago that was shy on Brooksie's.  If we presume his row (DP5 on my sheet) was not a DP row on the "Beckett" sheet, we can extrapolate the rest of the sheet:

DP2
DP3
DP4
DP5
SP1
DP1
DP2
DP3
DP4

Maybe not in that exact order and not ironclad until the second sheet turns up but the math works. This gives a final tally that you can check yourselves, of:

Rows DP1, DP2, DP3, DP4  = 4 appearances each over two sheets (16/24ths)
Row DP5 =  3 appearances over two sheets (3/24ths)
Row SP1 = 3 appearances over two sheets (3/24ths)
Row SP2 = 2 appearances over two sheets  (2/24ths)


My SP rows would not have been known by Beckett, so there are now 24 rows present and accounted for!  It may be disproven someday but right now I'm sticking with it.  As for the promised quiz-see if you can rearrange the theoretical second sheet to match what Beckett would have seen on a partial while still maintaining consistency with the list of SP's and DP's in the full 7th series list above and then have it prove out over 24 rows.

Pop Secret

Well Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukah folks!  Just a real quick one today, albeit holiday themed.

One of the most obscure Topps issues was sold at Christmas 1950 and featured everybody's favorite reindeer:

That is from Chris Benjamin's The Sport Americana Price Guide to the Non Sports Cards 1930-1960, the only place I have ever seen one.

You can barely make out the manufacturer information but it's clearly a Topps product; it was made by Topps Candy Division, which would only be around for another year or so.  This was a close copy of Hoppy Pops and Santa Pops, and a distance cousin of Play Money Pops.  Here, maybe you can read all of the fine print, I only verified the Candy Divison details:

Naughty Not Nice

One of the problems with buying vintage unopened Topps packs is that there is a lot of bogus product out there.  Wax packs are notorious for being pillaged, filled with commons and then resealed but cello packs are also created in ways to deceive.  However, the most obvious problem packs right now are "Christmas" rak paks.

Generally, these have a Holiday themed header card and three pockets of four cards each.  The earliest ones are from "1952", the latest ones stretch into the 1970's.  They are all 100% fake, produced well after the fact by third party sellers.

Here is a typical example:

That mix of black and red backs does not seem like something Topps would have ever done! Sadly, these are being sold in volume on eBay and many sell for healthy prices.  Here is a later one from "1958" that is quite heinous:

The Bessent and Berra cards are nasty; off-center and dinged cards are common in these fantasy packs.  Here is yet another example from "1968":

Other variants exist with header cards that are mostly white, with a candy cane motif and feature artfully aged staples.  I can't find a scan of one right now but they are out there and probably predate the ones above to the point they could have been produced in the late 60's or early 70's.  The first mention of these I can recall was in Sports Collectors Digest over 20 years ago, when they were (initially) presented as being legitimate to the era, if not Topps.

Unopened pack dealer and expert Steve Hart has been interviewed in a good piece on many bogus Topps packs, well worth a read. Don't let the grinch get you this holiday season!