This 'N That

It's been a while since i posted a miscellaneous thread with absolutely no focus or connecting material but I have to admit I'm hard pressed to find a topic this week given my post Thanksgiving torpor, so I'm just plumbing the depths of my hard drive. Sorry to be so lame but that's how it goes sometimes! Here's some stuff celebrating things not necessarily sold in a typical Topps retail pack:

Take a gander at a greeting card with a Hopalong Cassidy pack in it, pardner:

Freaking awesome, right?!

Here's some inserts that came in a typical Hoppy pack, or probably anything from Topps in 1950 (hey, I guess I did link something together):

Notice the little red spyglass that came with the "Wild West" cards?  Those were leftover X-Ray Roundup cards and you needed it to properly read the backs! Somewhere around here I have one of these I somehow acquired as a kid but it's not with the main collection and, truth be told, is semi-lost.

Here's a 1968 Ray Shafer card I just picked up-it's actually got a slight diamond cut, typical for Topps at the time unfortunately:  

More on that story here. Topps must have gotten a boost from him when they moved their plant to Duryea, PA from Brooklyn in early 1966 and helped out his campaign; it's certainly one of the more unusual items they ever produced.

Finally, here's a group of early 1960's Bazooka pennants:

At some point in the future I am going to try and disentangle all the various Bazooka baseball premiums but it's a major job. See ya next time!

A Slew Of Samples

I was inspired today by the recent news that well over 100 1966 Topps Baseball Salesman Sample strips are being offered up on eBay. Intact Salesman Samples, normally found in strips of three with a few variations on the theme, have always been difficult to find so for a hoard of this size to be liquidated the seller must need to be dumping them in a hurry. But I don't have those '66 strips in my sights today but rather thought a look at some strips and remnants outside of baseball would be interesting.

Here's a piece of the King recently offered on eBay:

Amusingly, and I realize it's hand cut, centering was an issue even on the samples! There's no way that left border measures out:

Here is what the complete 3 card sample strip looks like:

I realize 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong, but neither was $50,000:

After Elvis, the next fad was TV Westerns and Monsters. I can't find my scan of a 1959 You'll Die Laughing sample so it's the former and these two fit together like a puzzle.  The third card must have been excised more cleanly.

The back of this one has a bit of design; Topps was starting to move past basic text on these once the Bowman purchase was out of the way, or so it seems
.

I can't find an intact 3 card TV Westerns sample, so you have to imagine the last card! I always thought it odd the set had 71 cards but the above titles match the issued set.  Either a series they planned to include didn't work out as the count should probably be either 77 or 88 cards or they had trouble obtaining individual rights to a certain actor or two that screwed up the normal "divisible by 11" set count of the era. Maverick is a notable gap in their offering so maybe it was an inability to get a release from James Garner or even John Kelly that caused the truncation.

I'll close with a really sweet batch of 1963 Football. These are three but perhaps that count is low? Take a look:

The backs look like so:

Either that's a "four" or an alternate back exists.  Sometimes wholesaler's (jobbers) samples left space for an address.  Love the use of the green on the reverse but it should extend to the right a bit more on the third card, along with the text.

Order Up!

Ahoy campers-I have some really groovy stuff for you today!  Tom Goodwin wrote a long, heavily illustrated article in The Wrapper #308 about the production of the 1975 Topps Comic Book Heroes Stickers that really grabbed my attention. The highlight, at least from my perspective, was his inclusion of pictures of the Zabel Brothers production folder for the set. It was clear from his text that there was a bit more to this folder than was described or shown in the article so I reached out and Tom was kind enough to send a full set of scans.

I'll have to repeat Tom's main cover scan from the article but I don't plan to repeat his words. This cover has oodles of information about the printing and shipping of the set:

Actually, it's two sets (sort of)! We'll get to that momentarily. The 43" x 57" sheet size is important as it confirms the 264 card master sheet comprised a full uncut sheet.  24,000 of these suckers were ordered on pressure sensitive Ludlow stock, which was a type of stock Wacky Packages collectors will be familiar with. Looks like they came up 500 sheets short but it was made up by printing something else as part of the order, namely 500 additonal sheets of insert stickers for the Good Times set. (Update/5/18: It's actually 5,028 sheets of Good Times stickers and 500 additional sheets of Comic Book Heroes Stickers on different -acetate- stock. The delivery order is separate from the purchase order fro the printing of CBHS and Good Times stickers per Lonnie Cummins). We know this because of the bill of lading included in the folder:

I have to say it appears Good Times shipped 5,028 sheets so the additional 500 to make up the original order must have been added to a previous job of 4,528 sheets that was awaiting shipment. (UPDATE: 4/5/18-incorrect as per above update). CC stands for Commodity Code, otherwise known as the Production Code or Commodity number. This system allowed Topps to identify what type of packaging was to receive the cards shipped from Philadelphia by Zabel Brothers to their --wait for it--Brooklyn warehouse.

Brooklyn?!  Hold on Baba Looey, they were doing everything out of Duryea, PA at the time, or so I thought!  It would appear Brooklyn was still in the mix, which I'm quite surprised by.  Bristol Wholesale looks like the shippers, although it could be Bristol Wheels.

And now, math:

23,500 x 264 = 6,204,000 cards, or 112,800 of each impression of Comic Book Heroes on the sheet. It was a 44 sticker set, so six impressions of each would appear on the master sheet.

Good Times stickers?  1,327,392 of them, or 60,336 of each as there were 22 of them in the set.

I wonder if the Comic Book Heroes checklist/puzzle cards and Good Times cards were also printed and shipped together? It would sure make sense if they were.

Are these full production numbers or just one run?  Hard to say.  The folder has some other clues but nothing that will answer that question.

You can see there were a number of shipping batches.  This is a typical count and four such cards are in the folder:

It appears roughly 2,450 uncut sheets were packed per skid (pallet) and you can see which press was used to print the stickers. Card Processing is listed as the Bindery but that is Topps Brooklyn HQ, as we know from the bill of lading.

Here's some old school computer printouts showing a variety of production information (obviously these were two larger sheets):

It appears a proof sheet also made it into the folder:

That date stamp is for September 17, 1975-that must be the approved final artwork proof. It's worth noting I was in my third week of high school at the time-hoo boy!

I find this kind of stuff exciting but then again I'm pretty weird!  Many thanks to Tom Goodwin for peeling back a huge piece of the "cardboard curtain" that surrounds so much of the history of Topps.

Blister Blaster

Friend o'the Archive Rex Morgart has sent along a couple of scans of some packaging that relates, in a major way, to the 1980 Topps Baseball set.

If you wanted to quickly complete your 1980 set, this baby would get you well along in your task:

The price sticker is from Zayre's, a department store/discount chain that was pretty well known in the Northeast US and later expanded further south along the Eastern seaboard. It's heyday was probably right around 1980 and the parent company proved to be a trailblazer in home shopping and other areas of retail operations-it lives on today as TJX Corp, which owns TJ Maxx among others. Present market cap is around $45 Billion!

Anyhoo......Topps had a major distribution channel to thousands of retail stores in the US and I am thinking they would tailor packaging such as the above to the specific needs of various chains if they were big enough customers. We'll get to the Collecting Box momentarily but first feast your eyes upon the back of the blister pack:

Checklist!  A very smart idea if you ask me, hanging tab punch hole excepted.

The Collecting Box we have seen before, namely for the same year's The Empire Strikes Back set. Here's two flattened out views of said box:

That commodity code of T-126-27 indicates a test issue.  It's pretty sweet and has a killer shot of "The Penguin" as well. The thing is though, the Empire Strikes Back box has a non-test code:

1-885-58-01-0 means it was part of some regular issue packaging methinks.  I wonder if this means the Baseball box test was successful?

Luke, I am your cover.....

I have to wonder if there are more Collector Boxes out there from other sets in 1980.  You would need a big enough set to put a bunch of cards in blister packs, although Topps was infamous for throwing duplicates into their packaging.