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 seen, it was titled "the Hobbyist" and the idea was to have Woody show off some examples from his extensive collection of ephemera in future issues:

Some easy detective work revealed the magazine debuted in March of 1962 and lasted a whopping four issues.  It was published by Major League Baseball Promotions Corp., which was the licensing arm of the then-20 major league teams. Woody is described as the Publisher of the American Card Catalog, which is technically correct, although it was as a co-publisher and I doubt those in the hobby back then thought of anyone but Jefferson Burdick in that role.

Here's the then-current 1960 ACC's copyright page:

Gelman would have had prior experience with producing publications (and indeed was ACC co-publisher in 1953 and when that edition was reprinted in 1956) and with Jefferson Burdick in New York mounting his collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was in close proximity. It's certainly possible Woody did a lot of the heavy lifting with the 1960 edition.

Woody did publish a book titled the Baseball Card Checklist and sold it through both his Card Collectors Company and early newsletter The Card Collector. Too bad the column's intro blurb gets the title of this very early guide wrong!

The column is innocuous to a fault, although Woody's certainly pushing the main Topps card line in his commentary.  I find it intriguing he mentions old baseball programs as his Card Collectors Company sold very old ones off in their catalogs for a song. This was the scorecard pricing in the March 1962 CCC catalog, the very same month his column first appeared:

I'll take a slight pause on the Tatoo posts today as it's a lot to take in over four straight weeks like I originally planned and the topic is perhaps best served with a  break in between.  Instead, here's a little treat that, to me, was a completely unexpected find.That is from 1949, when Solomon & Gelman were in full force and in the throes of doing work for Topps. I know this because it's quite specifically dated:

A couple of Woody Gelman and Card Collectors Company related tidbits are offered today kids, which shed a little light on some dusty hobby corners.

Kicking off, we have a page from the May 1954 hobby publication called the American Card Collector, which looks to have been typeset in the same font as the American Card Catalog, making this a truly professional endeavor despite the "statue" typo in the lead paragraph. That's no surprise as Dr. Lawrence Kurzrok was in charge of this quarterly. Dr. Kurzrok was a notable collector of the day and friends with Woody Gelman, which explains the font (Gelman was Associate Editor in charge of Advertising and Publication for the 1953 ACC) and also this Woody-related piece :


There is some backstory here, namely that Woody went overseas with Joseph Shorin (and presumably others from that Topps owning family) to attend the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.  At some point he ended up in Belgium, which, if you've ever been to both countries, seems a wise choice, especially as Old Blighty was very much still recovering from the war. Four more countries were visited on his Continental Tour. That tarot card find by the good doctor seems to extend beyond ACC reach, no?

Next we have a CCC catalog from 1976, that sets the date of their infamous warehouse fire as March 30, 1975.  It was a big fire and their building's roof collapsed-this was not at a Gelman residence but in a Franklin Square shopping center.

Bonus content today kids, I fubar'ed the dating of this post!

I am sometimes surprised by various things that pop up concerning Topps and Woody Gelman but it's not often I am completely flabbergasted by them.  Well, friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann has done it and then some.  It all lurks behind this cover:


Yup, it's Woody Gelman!  And pictured--probably in his basement-- very near the end of his life as this issue is from 1978 (he died on Feb. 9th that year). Here is some very basic information (it gets better, I promise) about Card Collectors Company:


Next up we get a look at the inner sanctum of CCC, which I believe is Woody's garage in Malverne, New York (a stone's throw from Franklin Square, home of PO Box 293).  The roll in mailbags would seemingly indicate a ground-level operation as well:


I'm not positive but believe the woman at the upper left is his wife, Lillian. (UPDATE 4/12/24: It's not her) And the illustration at right looks like it could have been done by Art Spiegelman.  Love the mailbag and $180 check although it's probably not from a 12 year old; CCC was selling full Topps cases from years past when this magazine came out. From other research I am doing, if the photos were taken in 1977, $180 right then bought you 1,000 mint 1967 high numbers! And those library style file drawers were sold by CCC in their catalogs.  Like full vending cases of 12,000 cards, I suspect they got drop shipped from elsewhere given their weight and size.

Next, Woody's TV appearance gets some ink.  A nascent hobby and the referenced 1974 TV appearance probably led to this spread I'd imagine.

I'm in the midst of an extended series of posts that will probably begin to see the light of day in the next couple of weeks so today's effort is not going to involve a lot of heavy lifting.  I thought it would be fun to look at some of Woody Gelman's filing system today, namely the Idea Books he kept at Topps.

Woody had an extensive filing system and I'd imagine a pretty good amount of space at Brooklyn HQ by his notebooks, ephemera and whatnot.  He thought of this as part of his "idea retrieval" methods, which in a way are what the internet became well before anyone outside of ARPA or Bell Labs could grasp such a concept. Unfortunately, instead of being kept intact, these notebooks have been looted and pillaged over the years with all the pages and files being scattered across the hobby landscape with reckless abandon, stymying any hope of getting a complete picture painted. And so we have scraps...

Here's a neat one, possibly the earliest I've seen, 1955's Hocus Focus (large):


It's a little fuzzy and the infamous Woody all caps scrawl makes it even harder to read but above IDEA it says "Published" and the Item is "Photographic".  The Subclassification is "Hidden Pictures" and the See Under line has the set name.  This would not be consistent throughout Woody's long tenure at Topps, although he appears to have used mostly the same Idea page for his entire tenure with the company while inconsistently filling in the blanks. Having said that, the one I'll show next does not have any of the lined items off to the right, which looks like they tracked reaction from some group or groups of people (Topps execs, kids?) and some progress detail, which seems to be blank on most of the ones I've seen. I wonder if they kept a "clean version of some sets to show prospective licencees?

Here is "Copyright Merch." of a "test series", namely King Kong from 1965 (I have it as either '65 or 1966 but no matter this seems to cinch it at the earlier year), that got pulled when Donruss got the licensing deal.


Tattoos? Got ya covered (sorry) with 1967's Dr. Doolittle, unclear why it's not "licensed merchandise" though:

"Inserts Types" is what this is, and yes that is a 1964 Topps Giant Size Sandy Koufax cropped excerpt shrunk down to the size of a 1969 Deckle. This makes me think the original idea was to do this almost-great insert in color, which would have been stupendous.  I suspect color would have been a bit more expensive though, in a year of chaos and cost (a lot of pictures had to be takes once the MLBPA agreed to an enhanced deal with Topps and due to the expansion that year). No clue what 27-B means though in the Progress Record.

Pretty neat, eh?

A short time back I posted a canvass of eBay's supply of 1952 semi-high and high number Baseball cards. As long time readers of this blog know, I do not necessarily believe the story of Sy Berger riding a barge out to sea in 1960 and dumping what would now be several zillion dollars worth of '52 high numbers into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey.  Too many of the cards exist today and Topps had so many alternate avenues available to dump excess stock that it just doesn't add up.

We know some high numbers were shipped off to Venezuala. We also know a bunch were sold in Canada (no link here but enough on www.net54baseball.com exists if you want to shuffle over there and take a gander). Take that information, add in a dose of the usual paranoid Topps practice of having their employees deflect any probes into the actual workings of the business and sprinkle it with some oft-repeated hoary bits of PR department blather and you get the idea nobody, but nobody wanted these cards, or so the story went.

But here's the thing....Topps did have ways to burn off excess cards and had being doing so since their first card returns came back in 1949.  They sold early versions of Fun-Paks, slipped overstock into Trading Card Guild aftermarket offers and often, very quietly backdoored unsold and returned product through "unofficial" hobby dealers.  The first of these unofficial dealers was Sam Rosen-Woody Gelman's Stepfather-who started selling excess Topps stock in the early 50's and I suspect handled the Trading Card Guild orders initially before things eventually went to more of an arm's length agreement.

Back to the '52 highs.  The biggest problem I have with the dumping at sea story is the lack of highs from the Card Collectors Company's 1959 catalog after Sam Rosen had stocked them in his prior catalogs:


Look at the 1952 Topps entry.  You cannot buy a card above #310.  A year later, the highs are  available, right around the time Sy Berger purportedly went out to sea:


A dime for anything below #311, 35 cents for highs.  The availability is back and the premium pricing is starting to be baked in right around the time the barge full o'highs dumped her load in the Atlantic Bight.

1961? Well, the catalog got fancier with photos and the '52 highs must have financed the snazzier look (not, really):


Yup, the highs have jumped to fifty cents a pop, an almost 43% increase.  Other dealers had high number inventory at this time and at least one, Bruce Yeko, was on good terms with Woody Gelman.  Yeko had a good inventory of '52 high numbers in 1963, although not enough to offer the full series for a single price:


Those $1 high numbers match CCC in 1962 & '63.  I'm also curious about some other series pricing in these early catalogs. There's no scarce mid-series indicated in '57 and high numbers outside of 1952 are not yet commanding a premium.


That #1-99 pricing tranche is suspect but the highs were going for 7 to 8 times the lows and semi-high's a mere eleven years after they were issued.


Woody maintained his supply of '52 highs at a dollar apiece until at least 1968, where he had enough still to offer a de facto 10% discount if you bought the whole series intact. Woody seems like he still had a gaggle of highs by the time the Year of The Pitcher kicked off:


Not among the "very rare"-Mickey Mantle!  I'm going to track the scarce and high number pricing patterns shortly and will trace the '52 Mantle pricing through the years as well.

There's been some Flexichrome related discussion over at Net54 Baseball recently and its inadvertently brought my attention to a neat bit of Topps production art.

Topps used the Kodak Flexichrome process in earnest through their 1962 Baseball issue and then sporadically after that for another several years as needed.  It eventually became an unnecessary process and in fact the Flexichrome product line was discontinued in 1961 by Kodak. Used in combination with some airbrush techniques, you can usually spot a Flexichromed card a mile away.  Here's a couple of examples you may know.

1959 Topps #468:


See how "soft" the pictures look in the triptych? That's Flexichrome.

Here's #130 Lou Jackson from the same set.  If Topps has a sharp color image they would use it and forego the coloring process.  You can see the freckles on his face this shot is so clear:

This all brings us to a quite stunning piece of pre-production artwork, namely that of Dick Howser, showing how his image was prepared, courtesy of Friend o' the Archive R. C. McKenzie:


There is a bit to unpack here.  The sticker on the bottom lefty indicates this was from the famous 1989 auction of original Topps production materials, and indeed it was lot # C10 on  page 65 of the catalog:


The 17/049 notations must have been a storage location used prior to the auction.  Note the bitchin' Topps Auction stamp in the upper right corner:


Woody Gelman himself hand wrote the player identification...


...and the instructions to the Flexichrome artist:


The upside down writing on the right hand side of the backing board is a little harder to puzzle out and are in a different hand, possibly that of the artist coloring the piece. Sizing instructions are aboard too and that line at the end of the bottom pointing arrow here (pointing up on the original) is where the image was cutoff for the card:


Take a gander at the two left side line markings in red, laying out some macro geographic color real estate levels I think:


And the piece de resistance:


I love how you can see the green and blue Flexichrome paints oozing out from the original, like blotted watercolors.  A lot of masking went into the colorizing and it looks to me like the piece has slipped up a hair off the backing based on how the lines match up (note the one to the left indicting the top of the grass line and the 1 1/2 indicator arrow atop the right side).

What a fabulous piece of Topps history! Here's what all that massively involved work produced, you can see the crop atop Howser's cap indicated by the line shown above (it got cropped a little on the left and right sides, even if you account for the framing neatline:

Some very old (and old school) hobby catalogs have crossed my threshold recently, including a special one from Sam Rosen, who was Woody Gelman's Stepfather and started selling baseball cards as a retirement project prodded on by his Stepson.  Kind of handy to have a Stepson who worked for Topps if you were selling cards, right?

Sam issued a series of catalogs from (I believe) mid-1954 on and I suspect did fulfillment for the Trading Card Guild (note the initials) brand that was used by Topps to market ten cent cello packs with no gum, both a ploy necessary I'm sure to stave off legal action with Topps reselling their overstock and returns. I also believe the Guild fulfilled individual orders for various promotions run by Topps in those early years of card production.

This thread on www.net54baseball has some great old hobby catalogs shown and discussed within and there is some really nice Sam Rosen stuff in the mix. You will note, if you click through, a reference to 1958 catalog inserts from Rosen, specifically the 1956 Baseball Buttons Topps had pulled the plug on before one-third of all the ninety promised pins had been produced.  I recently obtained a single page sheet from Rosen detailing the set, which also served as a checklist, a hard to find resource for a lot of issues at the time:


The limited quantity of complete sets may be the result of three buttons issued in lesser quantities than the other 57: Chuck Diering, Hector Lopez and Chuck Stobbs. All three were bottom row subjects and being an edge subject  with Topps usually led to some production issues.  But I digress.

Sam Rosen died suddenly on New Year's Eve in 1958 and Woody Gelman took over the company, dubbing it the Card Collectors Company (CCC) and moving HQ from Midtown Manhattan to Franklin Square, Long Island. P.O. Box 293 was likely just that as Woody lived the next town over in Malverne and wouldn't want to give up his home's location.

In March of 1959 Gelman issued CCC catalog #10, picking up some kind of numbering scheme I cannot decipher from Sam Rosen (who was up to #12 well before 1958) and you will note the quick message at the top of the first page referencing the predecessor company:



Well, a look at page three shows that those limited sets of Baseball Buttons were holding on, albeit at higher prices than 1958's:


The 1960 CCC catalog #11 just had a line item for sets and singles (with unchanged pricing) and by catalog #12 from 1961 there were no more Baseball Buttons on offer, so I guess Woody finally dumped them all.  I would think a lot of the high grade examples in the hobby came from Rosen and Gelman.

Speaking of CCC catalog #12, they were well ahead of the Topps Vault and Guernsey's as there were "Topops" spot art cartoons being offered for a buck apiece, or three for $2.50, which was a steal considering that is some prime Jack Davis artwork being featured:


That's from McCovey's 1960 All Star card by the way, although it's flipped, no doubt because Willie batted left. I'm not sure why they didn't portray him as an African-American but there's no guarantee the batter in the cartoon was originally drawn to caricature Stretch.


Big Mac could really rake, huh?

It's looking like a pretty good year for Bowman ephemera, based upon a couple of unique and interesting bits that recently hit the auction block.

The first item to catch my attention was this shot of Joan Crosby (whozat? you ask) from June of 1953, offered by RMY Auctions:


For reasons I will get into momentarily, I don't believe she wrote card backs as that was, by all accounts I have read, the province of Bowman's art and ad agency run by George Moll.  Perhaps she worked for them at some point although I doubt it. Also dig the Woody Gelman red crayon at the upper right, likely referring to his filing system at Topps, which must have ended up with a trove of Bowman documentation post purchase.

If that wasn't enough, Heritage Auctions recently offered up Mickey Mantle's 1951 and 1955 Bowman contracts and a couple of other related items.  I suspect a collection of Bowman related ephemera is being dripped into the hobby, with the choicest pieces now appearing.

Herewith the Mick's agreement to be Bowman-ized:


That stamp on top means this document was a deposition entered into evidence in the original lawsuit Bowman filed against Topps, asserting the right to use the phrase "baseball" in selling bubble gum cards was solely Bowman's. I've got a cancelled check Bowman wrote out to Whitey Lockman in 1949 that also has the same stamp.

Turns out Mickey got some steak money four days earlier to start the process:


The 1956 end date is interesting, isn't it?  I wonder if a number of the early Bowman signees had contracts ending that year; it may help explain why Topps was able to buy Bowman out from John Connelly in February of that year if he didn't want to get into a low rent bidding war as he was preparing to greatly expand his other business, Crown Cork & Seal.

If there was any question as to who Mantle signed with, it was memorialized in this acknowledgement:


Topps prevailed in the original suit filed against them by Bowman but appeals and new suits emerged and in early 1953 a ruling came down asserting ballplayers (and everybody in the United States) had the right to control how their image and name was used by third parties. Ongoing legal actions seem to have dragged things out even further until, in the early days of 1955, this document was signed.


All of this gives more insight into a very important and interesting time in the early 50's for Topps and Bowman. Hopefully more Bowman documents leak out soon.