Exciting news, right? Well, there was a definite twist:
Yup, those are bindles of cards, seven per batch and I really don't think that they came that way from Topps. The Trading Card Guild box is 100% correct as that's how Topps branded their cards not sold with gum at the time (and through about 1966) but this was likely the work of a third party repackager. I'm not sure these were bindled for vending machines as it seems superfluous since those devices were designed to dispense cards in pre-measured quantities. The other thing against them to my mind is Topps would not put in a lot of extra work on resale items.
Two bindles were exposed for the auction and the centering is pretty typical of late 50's Topps cards:
A Topps vending box should have the cards packed neatly, and in a zebra stripe pattern, like this one from 1987:
So color me skeptical that 1959 box left the factory that way. Anything's possible I guess but I'd need a lot more evidence to be convinced. As part of the web surfing research I did for this post, I found that Topps still makes vending boxes of a sort, although I guarantee these will never see the inside of any kind of dispensing machinery. I think these were only resurrected in 2022:
A breaker on the Jabs Family You Tube channel broke a 2022 vending box and I tried to grab some stills. The advertised inserts rest on top of the regular issue cards:
There's no real zebra stripe pattern but things are done a lot differently these days. Topps stopped making the traditional vending boxes in the mid-1990's from what I can tell but I'm not sure of the exact year that happened.
You can watch the whole break here if you like:
I wonder what technology (or wrapping machine) could have been used to put the cards in that way.
ReplyDeleteI wonder it this could have been done in the 1980s or 1990s by someone.