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Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone
On the heels of last week's Rails and Sails post, I thought I would share some artwork scans from the set. Despite the mismatch of styles for Rails versus Sails, I consider this set to be the...
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Come Sail Your Ships Around Me
We're off to the high seas todays matey's, as we take a look at the waterborne portion of the 1955 Topps Rails and Sails set. As we all know, the style of paintings is a bit more in the tradition and...
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Fertile Crescent
Way back in 2008, almost at the start of this blog, I posted a super short piece about some Topps mockup creations that had been featured in a Gavin Riley Baseball Card News article in the mid 80's....
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What In The Sam Rosen Is Going On Here?
I was rolling through images on my hard drive the other day and pulled up a sell sheet from Sam Rosen (the antecedent, as a business, to Card Collectors Company and also the step-father to Woody...
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In Like Flynn
I've briefly mentioned Art Flynn Associates a couple of times here, as they were one of the firms used to procure baseball player contracts for Bowman, possibly the only one. In particular I have...
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Tickled Pink
Friend o'the Archive John Moran recently pushed some 1959 Topps Baseball partial proof sheet scans through to Net54 Baseball, where a clutch of dedicated sleuths are piecing together Topps press sheet...
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Whoa, These Chains Of Love
I ran across a neat proof sheet the other day of sixty percent of the 1964 Topps Beatles Plaks set. You may or may not know about these as they were an obscure issue from day one. It looks like the...
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A Yaz By Any Other Name
Some nice prices were recently realized in a recent auction or two over at Heritage for a couple of prototypes that were created as the 1968 Topps 3-D Baseball set was being developed and, while I...
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English Language Barrier
I used to frequently travel to London on business and would often marvel at the differences in phrases and words used to describe things when compared to comparable US jargon. In England, you don't...
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A May-September Marriage
Happy New Year folks! Today I want to dip into the recent past, December 9th, 2023 to be exact, wherein I examined some of the subtleties of a 1959 Topps Baseball 3rd series proof sheet. Friend o'the...
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The Mark Of Zorro
Wow, it's been close to a year since I visited the 1960 Venezuelan Baseball Tattoo issue. When last remarked upon here, the set was holding fast at nineteen confirmed subjects. Well late last year...
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Treading The (Card)boards
The various and myriad test issues spit out by Topps have always ignited collectors' passions and, as the years pass, done a number on many a bank account, mine included. What we tend to think of as a...
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The Gang's (Almost) All Here
BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd has sent along scans of a couple of exceptional Bazooka Joe and the Gang original art pieces for everybody's viewing pleasure. First up is Officer Bill, from an...
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Get Your Scorecards Here!
I found an interesting item in the wilds of eBay recently, namely a tearsheet of a column Topps Creative Director Woody Gelman penned for a fledgling magazine called Baseball Monthly. As can be plainly...
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Letters To Sy Over
I've recently been resuscitating a CD-R that was sent to me some time ago with thousands of scans covering Topps Vault items sold by them from 2007 to mid-2013 on eBay. Some of the files are corrupted...
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Posterity For Austerity
Friend o'the Archive David Eskenazi, who has been sending me various care packages of Topps corporate goodies from time to time, recently sent another batch my way. This time, the fully stuffed mailer...
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In Competition For the First Time
Continuing our look at the Topps Annual reports received from Friend o'the Archive David Eskenazi we come to the pivotal year of 1981. The specter of competition is imminent (their fiscal year ended...
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Gum Kind Of Wonderful
This will be the penultimate look at the four annual reports sent to me last year by Friend o'the Archive David Eskenazi. The numbers can get pretty tedious with these things so I'll focus more on...
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All You Need Is Cash
Well, here's the last of the Topps Annual Reports that were dispatched to me last year by Friend o'the Archive David Eskenazi, covering 1983 (with a very interesting addendum).1983 looked a lot like...
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We Pass The Savings On To You
Friend o'the Archive Mike Savage recently sent along some significant lists of specials from Woody Gelman's Card Collectors Company, issued but a mere fifty years (!) ago. There is some excellent...
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Don't Cello Me Short
Friend o'the Archive David Danberg posed a question to me recently about which specific packs could be found in which specific boxes of 1969 Topps Baseball cards. It's an interesting question because...
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The End Of Topps (Not-So-Slight Return)
Well, the inevitable happened the other day as Michael Eisner's Tornante Company and his partners, Madison Dearborn, sold off the last remaining bit of Topps Chewing Gum, or more properly these days,...
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A Krinkle In Time
Topps did some interesting cross-marketing over the years, which was often quite innovative, such as when they contracted with the Barker Greeting Card Company of Cincinnati to affix their penny packs...
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Chew 'Em If Ya Got 'Em
The origins of Topps directly relate back to the American Leaf Tobacco Company, founded by family patriarch Morris Shorin (Chigorinsky at the time) in 1908 after he branched out from rolling cigars as...
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Tape Measure Job
I picked up an opened penny pack of circa 1950 Bazooka last month in large part due to the fact the bubble gum was still intact and not broken like one would expect after seventy five years in...
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