Today, I wanted to look back at and share information from the early days of Topps as a card company, particularly the Federal Trade Commission decision regarding a complaint made against Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., alleging unfair competition methods in gaining control of the baseball card picture industry.
As you can see in the image above, the court dismissed the case on April 30, 1965, because there was insufficient evidence.
While the complaint uses a lot of legal jargon to allege a “monopoly in the manufacture and distribution of baseball picture cards in commerce,” as a collector, I find equally fascinating the reporting of sports card sales numbers from Topps, Bowman, Goudey, and Fleer.
First Goudey Sales:
Next Bowman Sales:
Topps sales in those years were as follows:
Topps sales once there were no Bowman cards were (“Baseball card gum” being packs with gum in them, and “Baseball cards” being products like vending boxes, cello, and rack packs that didn’t have gum):
And finally, Fleer sales figures:
I’ll pour through this 112-page document in the future to see what other insights we can glean about the post-war baseball card market and the impact Topps’ actions as a company had on its competitors. That will come in the future as a Part 2 of this article. But these numbers are our best insight into figuring out how many cards Topps and other companies actually produced in the early post-war era.
Happy collecting!