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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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One and Done
A quite interesting (and supremely rare) Topps salesman's sample recently came across my transom, courtesy of Friend o'the Archive Larry Sarver. While most samples are related to Topps Baseball cards,...
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Hey, Mr. Spaceman
Friend o'the Archive Jason Liebig sent along a couple of amazing scans a little while back and they are, quite, literally out of this world. Check this bad boy out:First of all, kudos to Topps for...
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How Ya Doin' Sport?
Friend o'the Archive David Eskenazi has been sending me all sorts of goodies over the past several months and the barrage continues with two editions of the Topps Sports Club News plus a neat little...
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Membership Has Its Privileges
Back at it kids, with more peeks at Topps Sports Club news today!The cover of Issue #3 had confused me when I first encountered it as I wasn't sure if there was, in addition to the Bobby Clarke 8x10,...
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Cello, I Must Be Going
Not too long ago I took a look at the 1969 Baseball Cello packaging. Well, Friend o'the Archive John Moran turned up another version of the display box that has a splash panel for the 1969 Deckles to...
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Berry Bad
So I've quite inadvertently compounded a longstanding mystery, thanks to a couple of wayward scans I stumbled upon back in April on eBay. Perhaps only the nerdiest among us recall my posts concerning...
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Blankety Blanks
I had long thought the saga of the 1971 Topps Winners Cards (OK, technically they hail from 1972 but no one refers to them that way) was concluded here but as it turns out I was, wrong about that. Oh,...
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Swann Song
Further to some recent posts about the quite nicely-done Topps Sports Club News, Friend o'the Archive John Moran sent along scans of all six pages of what I believe is the final issue, Volume 2, Number...
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I'm With Stupid
So we have seen the last of several spectacular auctions of material from the Andy Yanchus collection that were held over the past couple of years. Yanchus was a former designer for Aurora Plastics...
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Cocktail TIme
Every once in a while I like to bring Bowman into the mix here since its been a Topps brand since 1956. The name didn't really get much use after the acquisition until a set of Baseball cards using...
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The Big And The Bad
Topps released all sorts of button sets over the years, starting with 1956's Baseball Buttons. They then began issuing humorous pin sets, most of them metallic, on a semi-regular basis in 1960 with...
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