Problematic

A short time back I posted a canvass of eBay's supply of 1952 semi-high and high number Baseball cards. As long time readers of this blog know, I do not necessarily believe the story of Sy Berger riding a barge out to sea in 1960 and dumping what would now be several zillion dollars worth of '52 high numbers into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey.  Too many of the cards exist today and Topps had so many alternate avenues available to dump excess stock that it just doesn't add up.

We know some high numbers were shipped off to Venezuala. We also know a bunch were sold in Canada (no link here but enough on www.net54baseball.com exists if you want to shuffle over there and take a gander). Take that information, add in a dose of the usual paranoid Topps practice of having their employees deflect any probes into the actual workings of the business and sprinkle it with some oft-repeated hoary bits of PR department blather and you get the idea nobody, but nobody wanted these cards, or so the story went.

But here's the thing....Topps did have ways to burn off excess cards and had being doing so since their first card returns came back in 1949.  They sold early versions of Fun-Paks, slipped overstock into Trading Card Guild aftermarket offers and often, very quietly backdoored unsold and returned product through "unofficial" hobby dealers.  The first of these unofficial dealers was Sam Rosen-Woody Gelman's Stepfather-who started selling excess Topps stock in the early 50's and I suspect handled the Trading Card Guild orders initially before things eventually went to more of an arm's length agreement.

Back to the '52 highs.  The biggest problem I have with the dumping at sea story is the lack of highs from the Card Collectors Company's 1959 catalog after Sam Rosen had stocked them in his prior catalogs:

Look at the 1952 Topps entry.  You cannot buy a card above #310.  A year later, the highs are  available, right around the time Sy Berger purportedly went out to sea:

A dime for anything below #311, 35 cents for highs.  The availability is back and the premium pricing is starting to be baked in right around the time the barge full o'highs dumped her load in the Atlantic Bight.

1961? Well, the catalog got fancier with photos and the '52 highs must have financed the snazzier look (not, really):

Yup, the highs have jumped to fifty cents a pop, an almost 43% increase.  Other dealers had high number inventory at this time and at least one, Bruce Yeko, was on good terms with Woody Gelman.  Yeko had a good inventory of '52 high numbers in 1963, although not enough to offer the full series for a single price:

(courtesy David Kathman)

Those $1 high numbers match CCC in 1962 & '63.  I'm also curious about some other series pricing in these early catalogs. There's no scarce mid-series indicated in '57 and high numbers outside of 1952 are not yet commanding a premium.

That #1-99 pricing tranche is suspect but the highs were going for 7 to 8 times the lows and semi-high's a mere eleven years after they were issued.

Woody maintained his supply of '52 highs at a dollar apiece until at least 1968, where he had enough still to offer a de facto 10% discount if you bought the whole series intact. Woody seems like he still had a gaggle of highs by the time the Year of The Pitcher kicked off:

Not among the "very rare"-Mickey Mantle!  I'm going to track the scarce and high number pricing patterns shortly and will trace the '52 Mantle pricing through the years as well.

Bucket List?

A very interesting bit of Topps history has popped up at Huggins & Scott this past week.  Our most intrepid readers may recall a major Pennsylvania find about a dozen years ago of the 1968 Topps Baseball Plaks test issue being covered here. You can click through for the full story but a former Topps employee in Scranton had saved a bunch of the Plaks (it seems employees could take home failed test products!) and would occasionally hand some out to the neighborhood kids.  Interest in little plastic busts of baseball players remained low however and she literally shelved the Plaks for the next forty years as they resided in a bucket in her garage. There were some intact sprues of three subjects still and some singles but who knows how many she hand handed out forty years prior?

Mile High's Brian Drent ended up with the consignment and began selling them in 2009. The find revealed 19 of the 24 players depicted on the stunningly nice cardboard checklists plus a Mantle variant ("big nose"). A lone Willie Mays Plak was found elsewhere and the set checklist remains I believe at 20, with four players still unaccounted for:

• Hank Aaron
• Don Drysdale
• Gary Peters
• Frank Robinson

A minimum of four of each subjects (save Mays, with none) were in the original find and some players appeared on three different sprues, fueling thoughts the missing four were just subbed out with duplicates.  I would caution against that scenario being accepted at face value as it's unknown how many Plaks were handed out by the former Topps employee. Here is an example of an intact sprue with the Mays no less, courtesy of Larry Serota:

The Plaks and even the little connecting pegs and blobs are actually quite sturdy, surprisingly so as I found out when I ended up with a "Tom" Davis bust from the find. Prices were depressed a little after the find (it was extremely hard to find examples prior) but the sell through was not completed IIRC. These remain scarce, still with limited appeal I'd say although the colorful photo checklists are popular with HOF collectors and around in a little bit more quantity with 67 showing in the present PSA pop report. 

Now we have another Pennsylvania find (or maybe something held back from 2008)-uncut strips of the checklists!  Check these bad boys out, eleven in a row for each league!

I don't know if these were reference copies, proofs or what but the rows seem to be complete at 11 across.  I had through the checklists were originally cut vertically before the final cut but that may not be the case. Either way, this is a crazy and wonderful find!

Howser 'Bout That

There's been some Flexichrome related discussion over at Net54 Baseball recently and its inadvertently brought my attention to a neat bit of Topps production art.

Topps used the Kodak Flexichrome process in earnest through their 1962 Baseball issue and then sporadically after that for another several years as needed.  It eventually became an unnecessary process and in fact the Flexichrome product line was discontinued in 1961 by Kodak. Used in combination with some airbrush techniques, you can usually spot a Flexichromed card a mile away.  Here's a couple of examples you may know.

1959 Topps #468:

See how "soft" the pictures look in the triptych? That's Flexichrome.

Here's #130 Lou Jackson from the same set.  If Topps has a sharp color image they would use it and forego the coloring process.  You can see the freckles on his face this shot is so clear:

Compare that to this 1960 Rookie Star, #131 Ed Hobaugh, who looks decidedly unnatural:

This all brings us to a quite stunning piece of pre-production artwork, namely that of Dick Howser, showing how his image was prepared, courtesy of Friend o' the Archive R. C. McKenzie:

There is a bit to unpack here.  The sticker on the bottom lefty indicates this was from the famous 1989 auction of original Topps production materials, and indeed it was lot # C10 on  page 65 of the catalog:

The 17/049 notations must have been a storage location used prior to the auction.  Note the bitchin' Topps Auction stamp in the upper right corner:

Woody Gelman himself hand wrote the player identification...

...and the instructions to the Flexichrome artist:

The upside down writing on the right hand side of the backing board is a little harder to puzzle out and are in a different hand, possibly that of the artist coloring the piece. Sizing instructions are aboard too and that line at the end of the bottom pointing arrow here (pointing up on the original) is where the image was cutoff for the card:

Take a gander at the two left side line markings in red, laying out some macro geographic color real estate levels I think:

And the piece de resistance:

I love how you can see the green and blue Flexichrome paints oozing out from the original, like blotted watercolors.  A lot of masking went into the colorizing and it looks to me like the piece has slipped up a hair off the backing based on how the lines match up (note the one to the left indicting the top of the grass line and the 1 1/2 indicator arrow atop the right side).

What a fabulous piece of Topps history! Here's what all that massively involved work produced, you can see the crop atop Howser's cap indicated by the line shown above (it got cropped a little on the left and right sides, even if you account for the framing neatline:

Cartoon Reruns

Happy Wednesday folks-more inspired research from Friend o'the Archive Roy Carlson today.

Take a look at these three Topps cards from 1966 and '67:

No apparent connection, right?  Well Mr. C has certainly found one. Check this out:

Yup, those cartoons on the '67 Ribant are recycled from 1966!  Let's take a closer look.  Here's what ended up on his 1967 card:

So poor Sammy Ellis had his cartoon hijacked and then changed.  At least both of the noted events were no hitters! Here's a little peek-a-boo or two:

Roy notes regarding the Ribant that "the 1967 finished card's left cartoon has an extra 2 hash marks by the pitcher's left arm. Those are actually a portion of the number "3" from "377", the card number that was written on Turk Farrell's 1966 cartoon. Also, based on the crudely cut and glued 1967 text board, a portion of the pitcher's glove gets covered.  One needs to look at the 1966 card to fully enjoy the full glove detail.  Plus, the 1967 text on the right cartoon was written on separate board, then apparently cut poorly, slicing a bit of the boxed "I" in the word "IN".  The artist or editor had to re-draw the left portion of the I box on the final cartoon."

Here's more from the Ribant card's back, you can see the glove is cut off on the left cartoon and the redrawn point of the I is broken on the right side one:

More cartoon fun soon!

Gummy, Gummy, Gummy

Well I am approaching my third month of quarantine and I have to tell you, seeing some MLB on TV or maybe the NHL playoffs would be real nice right about now.  Alas......

I thought this would just be a series of random images today but a bit of a gum theme developed, so I just went with it.

1949's Pixie Bubble Gum, which contained an X-Ray Roundup card (the gum and the cards were assigned different names early on by Topps before someone realized it was a stupid idea) and the red cello viewer needed to decipher the back.  I can't say I've seen a pack (emptied of the gum) offered with a viewer before but the card is also missing!

You could send away for a handheld viewer though, via this "waxy" insert found, in this case, in packs of Hopalong Cassidy:

Check out this other waxy insert from A&BC with Bazooka Joe offering a premium scarf of your favorite football club-fab!

Reminds me of similar 1967-68 inserts from the Topps Baseball and Football packs that advertised or promoted various things.  I tried to determine the date of this thinking it just listed First Division teams and a couple from the Scottish League but there was no correlation.  Seller just had it as being from the 70's.

After Topps tried to resurrect their Mini-Chiclets like Blockbuster gum in a bizarre reusable straw configuration they went with a new name, Gumniks, filled with the product in 1974. Or was it vice-versa?  Either way:

Here's another gum piece that Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins passed along a little while ago.  I can't find any information on it, does anyone out there know anything about it?

That's a very wholesome looking ad!

Stay safe out there folks!

(Update 5/23/20: Found a Grape Gumniks, in all its artificially flavored glory-I loved that flavor as a kid):

Parade Of The Horribles

Further to a very old post here, I've found some additional information regarding the very strange and Topps affliated 1967 Rubber Uglies "set".  These little blighters were loosely associated with the 1965 Ugly Stickers set but were soft, rubbery, icky looking monsters and not made of cardboard.  I thought they had been sold in vending capsules (and very well may have) but it looks like you could buy them right out of the box:

That's a whole lotta Ugly! Except not enough as it seems full set is 32 in number (unconfirmed but likely).

It turns out that box artwork was done by Wally Wood, so maybe not so ugly after all: 

These are still a bit mysterious and there are a zillion knockoffs that were sold over the years but these are the real ("Topps", sorta) deal. I'm not real clear on whether or not this was a quasi-licensed set (wink-wink) or a total bootleg job but the Wood and Norman Saunders connections gives them an air of legitimacy.

My 2009 post mentioned a 1970's resale in blister packs, well here is an example, from the Norman Saunders site:

I like how the three in the pack form a kind of choreographed scene!

A Rosen By Any Other Name

Some very old (and old school) hobby catalogs have crossed my threshold recently, including a special one from Sam Rosen, who was Woody Gelman's Stepfather and started selling baseball cards as a retirement project prodded on by his Stepson.  Kind of handy to have a Stepson who worked for Topps if you were selling cards, right?

Sam issued a series of catalogs from (I believe) mid-1954 on and I suspect did fulfillment for the Trading Card Guild (note the initials) brand that was used by Topps to market ten cent cello packs with no gum, both a ploy necessary I'm sure to stave off legal action with Topps reselling their overstock and returns. I also believe the Guild fulfilled individual orders for various promotions run by Topps in those early years of card production.

This thread on www.net54baseball has some great old hobby catalogs shown and discussed within and there is some really nice Sam Rosen stuff in the mix. You will note, if you click through, a reference to 1958 catalog inserts from Rosen, specifically the 1956 Baseball Buttons Topps had pulled the plug on before one-third of all the ninety promised pins had been produced.  I recently obtained a single page sheet from Rosen detailing the set, which also served as a checklist, a hard to find resource for a lot of issues at the time:

The limited quantity of complete sets may be the result of three buttons issued in lesser quantities than the other 57: Chuck Diering, Hector Lopez and Chuck Stobbs. All three were bottom row subjects and being an edge subject  with Topps usually led to some production issues.  But I digress.

Sam Rosen died suddenly on New Year's Eve in 1958 and Woody Gelman took over the company, dubbing it the Card Collectors Company (CCC) and moving HQ from Midtown Manhattan to Franklin Square, Long Island. P.O. Box 293 was likely just that as Woody lived the next town over in Malverne and wouldn't want to give up his home's location.

In March of 1959 Gelman issued CCC catalog #10, picking up some kind of numbering scheme I cannot decipher from Sam Rosen (who was up to #12 well before 1958) and you will note the quick message at the top of the first page referencing the predecessor company:

Well, a look at page three shows that those limited sets of Baseball Buttons were holding on, albeit at higher prices than 1958's:

The 1960 CCC catalog #11 just had a line item for sets and singles (with unchanged pricing) and by catalog #12 from 1961 there were no more Baseball Buttons on offer, so I guess Woody finally dumped them all.  I would think a lot of the high grade examples in the hobby came from Rosen and Gelman.

Speaking of CCC catalog #12, they were well ahead of the Topps Vault and Guernsey's as there were "Topops" spot art cartoons being offered for a buck apiece, or three for $2.50, which was a steal considering that is some prime Jack Davis artwork being featured:

That's from McCovey's 1960 All Star card by the way, although it's flipped, no doubt because Willie batted left. I'm not sure why they didn't portray him as an African-American but there's no guarantee the batter in the cartoon was originally drawn to caricature Stretch.

Big Mac could really rake, huh?