'68 = Great

Fresh in from the wilds of the 'bay is this neat Card Collectors Company catalog dated January 15, 1968 (their 20th!), clocking in at a fairly hefty ten pages.  Before the internet and before or just around the birth of the modern card show, Card Collectors Co enticed collectors with mail order goodness. So let's take a peek, realizing that there will be some repetition with their 1965 catalog shown here recently.

 Red and Blue Backs but no sets of the Reds? The last reference is to a Reds Team Card. Odd that there were only Blue Back sets though.  And a complete run of '52 highs for $90?  Sold!  An just an eight cent difference twixt the low and high numbers in 1953.  1954 lows (#1-50)were two cents less than the rest of the 54's.  No surprises in 1955 but those Baseball Buttons look like a steal at five for a quarter, even if Woody got to pick them himself.

Here's an expected development-nos. 265 to 352 are described as "extremely scarce."  In 1958 the four cards pulled to make way for extra prints of the Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle All Star cards (nos. 443, 446, 450 and 462) carry a premium of nineteen cents compared to six cents for a common.  1959 and '60 are ho-hum and there is barely a premium for 1961 highs, which are pretty tough. No premium at all for highs from 1962-66.

1967 brings no hint of the short print mania that was to come and Bazooka cards seem to be a mix of panels and singles.  Of interest are the 1967 Red Sox and Pirates Stickers, sold as a combined set of 66 for $2.95 plus P&H.  Those are described as "Very scarce!" And for a mere $1.50 you could have a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie all to yourself!  The Black & White 53's go for ten cents more then the Color cards and there is no 1954 Bowman Ted Williams

Page four is a real hodgepodge and you will note only the first series of 1960 Leaf cards are available, both could be had three years earlier.

Football?  You bet!  They get the year wrong but there are some 1951 Magic Football singles and 1952 Bowman Large cards are cheaper than the small ones (were it so today)!  Bowman Football sets are either early (1948 and 1950) or late (1955). I suspect the smaller, earlier cards were not as popular and we all know what happened in 1955 and Bowman may have been left with a lot of unsold gridiron product as a result. We also get Hockey cards from 1955 (the 1954-55 set) which seemingly confirms some of these were sold in the U.S.  Parkies, CFL and T206 cards could be purchased for nominal prices along with an adjustable baseball ring!

Larger cards abound on page 6 but supplies of 1959 Bazooka Baseball are dwindling so you better act fast!

Can you imagine buying up all those old scorecards?  Yowsers!

The Pot Luck page shows supplies of certain issues that were abundant three years earlier were running out, although some of the sets featured could still be bought fully formed two pages hence.

I believe that would be the hardcover version of the 1960 American Card Catalog available for $4.25 but there was a paperback reprint made in 1967 that surprisingly is not for sale.  Those Topps Trading Card Guild Albums for sixty cents apiece seem like a good deal as well.

And so we come to the end.  I guess if you didn't have at least 75 cents you were out of luck....

The Devil Made Them Do It

I am a few months early (or late, depending on your perspective) but have had some really nice color scans sitting on my hard drive for a bit from a 1965 Topps Hallowe'en marketing brochure forever and figured today was the day.  I think these were provided by BBF O'the Archive (that's Best Bubblegum Friend) Jeff Shepherd but I usually tag his stuff and the scans are decidedly untagged.

Page one shows your typical, idealized Topps Topps consumer, the latest in a lengthy string of freckle-faced kids that went back to the 40's:

He;'s got quite the haul there!  The Bozo gumballs are interesting to me as I think they had just re-entered the US product line at this time, having been exiled to Canada for a bit (I could be wrong about that though, perhaps they were still sold in the US since their introduction in 1949).

Page 2 brings us Bazooka, Bazooka and more Bazooka:

I don't know why there were such minute differences in the counts.  20 pieces of bubble gum vs. 25 or 100 vs. 110 in the larger size seems like like splitting hairs.

More hair splitting but these are Hallowe'en themed packages now. I guess Topps just had a price point for every conceivable market; they had just eliminated penny packs earlier in the year after 17 years years of faithful service carving out market share vs. profit.

I can't quite make out the logo on the gumball pack at top left but it may be generic. Ten party bags included, woo-hoo!  Those Fun Packs look familiar and could have held any number of goodies.  I think the 1965-ish Flash Gordon cards were dated based upon this catalog since they came in these style packs but Topps may have used the design for a couple of years hence.  We have Bazooka and Bozo at the bottom:

I believe this is page five but I could be wrong.  This was either a folding brochure or I am missing a couple of pages.  Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, I guess:

Sweet displays; I suspect not too many of these survived:

The highly professional look of this brochure was typical for Topps.  They would send these to their jobbers (wholesalers) and direct retail accounts (larger chains like Woolworth's and Rexall Drugs) and there were probably five or six such brochures produced every year, in additional to all the salesman samples, promotional items and the like.  

It was all good business despite the obvious expense.  In 1961, the last year I can find a documented record for, Topps had total sales of $13,500,000 and Bazooka accounted for over half of that at $7,700,000.  Topps also sold $3,475,000 worth of baseball cards in '61 and they were actually down slightly from 1960 thanks to Fleer ramping up their card production.  That means everything else they sold, which would primarily have been Football, a little bit of Hockey, some Non Sports cards and whatever else they had their fingers into, amounted to $2,325,000. 

Pen Pals

Well once again BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd has come through with some unique Topps pieces.  In today's episode, we find two ballpoint pens, given out by the Topps salesmen no doubt, to help their customers (wholesalers and large retail accounts) fill out their order forms:

I need to look at some reference scans to see if those Topps logos match up with salesman samples but I would peg these as mid to late 50's, maybe a little later on the top one.  There are all sorts of Topps promo pieces but you just don lt see them too often.  Thanks Shep!

In The Bag

I keep trying to move this blog into the post 1956 era at Topps but sometimes there just seems to be so much cool stuff prior to that things don't go as planned.

A little while back Hake's had a neat Hoppy piece that no one had really seen before, at least in the circles I trade information within.  This little bugger was quite the item:

Like, wow.......and as it turns out, it's a Topps Candy Division piece (one of their very few):

The Chattanooga reference that was on some old Topps Candy products is not present here so I wonder if, despite the 1950 copyright date, this bag came out after the closing of that plant in 1951. The ingredients list is the same as the one on the Hoppy Pops wrapper illustration that appeared in Chris Benjamin's Sport Americana Price Guide to the Non-Sports Cards so I surmise it held an abundance of said lollipops, likely quite stale ones if this was used to sell old, unsold product:

The Saddle Bag sold for just over $200.00, which I thought was a steal considering how scarce an item this is.  You can see the listing for yourself here.  The (authentic) Topps Archives continue to surprise!

Red Back, Wrong Back

Well your blogmaster picked up a very odd 1951 Topps Red Back last week. Offered for sale was a split panel of #7 Howie and #12 Jim Hegan:

 I already have an example of an intact panel plus a full set, so it wasn't those two mugs that grabbed my attention but rather what was shaking on the backs of these cards:

Yes, that is a large portion of the reverse of a 1951 Topps Team card!  This particular oddity was likely produced during the second run of Red Backs and Teams, where brilliant white stock was used (the first run was cream for both sets). I believe this would mean the Team cards were of the undated variety, the 1950 dated versions coming last since they only come on brilliant white stock.

So what to make of this monster?  Well, I think it means the Teams, which were on the same sheet as the Connie Mack All Stars (see the miscut below to see how they were next to each other on the sheet), but probably not the Red Backs, had been run off first.

My initial operating theory is that the red ink for the Team cards, which is the same as used on the Red Backs, was run off on a couple of Red Back sheets as a color test, then put aside to be used to  used with other waste sheets as protection on the tops and bottoms of each stack of uncut sheets as they were palletized and banded for transportation from the printer in Baltimore to Brooklyn. I still think that latter part is correct but am rehthinking if all three sets were on the same sheet since they were sold together as Baseball Candy in 1951

The orientation is right I think when my miscut backs are compared to Connie Mack above- printed to the side and not atop a Team card.

I have never seen anything like these two Red Backs and wonder if any more are out there.  I started a thread on Net54 about them as well, which may be worth checking in on. Hopefully more information can be developed.

Catalog Crazy!

Well, I was tragically outbid on a March 1965 price list from Card Collectors Company (one of Woody Gelman's side gigs) but managed to snag a bunch of scans that were quite illuminating.  Here goes...

Some items immediately grabbed my attention:

1) The 1951 All Stars "set" of 22 must have included not only all 11 Connie Mack All Stars but also the eight Major League All Stars and by implication the three super short prints!  (UPDATE 6/1/13 Keith Olbermann has advised CCC was NOT selling the three short prints).

2) 1952 high numbers were already scarce, going for a buck a pop. I am trying to reconcile this with the large number allegedly dumped by Topps in 1960 (a story I do not believe anymore).

3) 1956 Baseball Buttons (Pins) could be had at a nickel apiece, although the supply seems thin nine years after issue.

4) There were no full sets of 1964 Baseball Coins available mere months after they had been inserted into the 1964 packs.

5) 1959 Bazooka baseball cards could be had for fifteen cents each (see TOPPS GIANT SIZE in the  lower right corner).  I wonder if they were still on the box flats?

Next up, pages two and three:

Bowman's, Leaf's, T206's (a whopping forty cents each!) but the Canadian cards, including some Parkhursts are an eye opener.  Topps Hockey would have entered the US hobby this way. And Woody selling Fleer cards while Topps was  locked in a huge court battle with them is downright bizarre. Plus, more Bazooka! Not sure what the Baseball Card Check List was-possibly Charles Bray's American Book of Checklists? (UPDATE 6/1/13/: Keith Olbermann has also advised this was Woody's own bare bones checklist).

Feeling bookish?  The next set of pages will help:

All sorts of goodies here from primeval card storgae to ACC's to Basketball cards from Topps and Bowman.  You can almost hear the anguished cries of old school hobbyists needing proper storage ringing out.

Non Sports?  Check:

I see Space cards but where is Target: Moon?  Next up: Exhibits:

Too bad the want ad is cutoff, I am curious what Woody was still after. Things finish off with pictures (I think a page or two was missing from either the auction or the scan:

Given the treasure trove of information here, if any readers have good scans of other CCC catalog, please send them along for a future installment.

Target: Moon Date

Back in 2012 I had an article appear in The Wrapper #265 that compared the vastly similar Space Cards and Target: Moon issues and attempted to date each set as the conventional hobby wisdom had them both coming out at the same time in 1957 or '58.  I was able to determine Space Cards had been issued in 1957 and Target: Moon (the blue backed edition) had come out sometime after mid-1958 due to differences in the Bazooka advertising on the wrappers. My conclusion on Target: Moon was that is had likely been issued in 1962 but that there was a possible date range of mid-1958 to mid-1963. I won't bore you with the details but you can read all about it here.

Thanks to a Target: Moon penny box proof being offered in the latest Legendary auction, another piece of the puzzle has been revealed.  This proof gives us a good look at the box bottom, which along with the indicia on many period wrappers, is often the best way to glean information about the peculiarities of certain sets.  The proof is magnificent:

I'll flip it around so you can read it but the red copyright strip on what would be the box bottom is a big clue as to possible time frame, as is the inclusion of a Blony "hint" on the back panel. The first thing to notice though is that the Bazooka gum tab shown states "Topps" and not "The Atom" on the red triangle portion, which confirms the mid 1958 or later date of issue.

Blony will be revisited in a minute but lets check out the copyright strip up close:

The address is our quarry here as it states Brooklyn 32, N.Y., which is proper since it should predate the use of ZIP codes which came into use on July 1, 1963. The colored bar of copyright, and manufacturing information first saw use by Topps in 1955 and stopped in 1963.  Here are some other box bottoms for comparison.  First 1957 Baseball:

An exact match (not always the case). Here is a 1962 Baseball Bucks box:

It's blurry but there is a "32" postal designation in the color bar.  By 1963 the color bar was gone as a new style was introduced but the "32" was still there, at least in the beginning of the year as this 1963 Baseball box shows:

1963's Beverly Hillbillies was similar to the above:

Not all issues follow these patterns.  There is a 1961 Baseball box with no color bar and no "32" and some 1964 Baseball boxes have no indicia on the bottom at all (possibly due to the ZIP code changeover) and to further confuse things a 1965 Outer Limits box still has the "32" plus a PO Box number as it identifies Topps alter-ego Bubbles, Inc. but I think you get my drift; the color bar disappears in 1963, so Target: Moon would have been issued before then.  The "32" slowly faded away and a Brooklyn, N.Y. address without it or a ZIP code followed.  Around the time of the move to Duryea in 1966 a 11232 ZIP code came into play until Brooklyn itself was banished in mid-1969 as Topps abandoned their roots for good.

Now what about that furshlugginer Blony ad? As we know, Topps acquired the brand when it bought Bowman in 1956.  I don't know when Blony ads featuring the "rainbow" bubble shown on the Target: Moon box started showing up in earnest once Topps redesigned that brand's wrapper so that's no help, although it was identified as a "twin" pack (2 pieces) in some 1957 product ads (the rainbow pack is not a twin pack I don't think). Blony continued on, spasmodically, into the 1970's but underwent another redesign in 1969.  

As of now, I am wavering on my 1962 estimated issue date for Target: Moon and hoping to develop a little more information on the Blony graphics to nail the date down better.  Jeff Shepherd has a huge amount of his collection featured in a new book about Bazooka Joe (go buy it-trust me) and he has some dating on Blony wrappers I want to think about and discuss with him. As always, readers thoughts are appreciated.

(UPDATE May 30, 2013: As usual, Shep comes through-the rainbow design on Blony was used in 1957-58  (when a major redesign occurred) while the "Topps" version of Bazooka replaced the "Atom" version in mid 1958.  So Target: Moon must have been a reissue of Space Cards a year after the original issue. This reissue was missed by the American Card Catalog compilers in the 1960 (and last) version of that guide.)