Babe Ruth General Gum Sign/Display

[jerseygary]

I've followed this thread closely. I am a graphic designer and have studied the history of my profession over the years and an somewhat familiar with the way things were printed and made to work through the decades. Without seeing this piece in person, it's impossible for me to make a conclusion when it comes to the way it was printed.

I also create "period correct" props for movies and TV shows. I know from my own work that it is very easy for a trained person to make a modern piece look and feel "old" until it is thoroughly examined up close. I just did a group of circa 1933 cardboard soft drink, tobacco and candy display signs for a movie that is being filmed right now. Between my designs which use 1933-correct typefaces and colors and the prop master or set decorator who artificially aged the pieces on set, you would be hard pressed to say one way of the other if they were authentic or not until you have it in hand.

A few years ago I was asked by a major auction house to give my opinion on an incredibly large collection of baseball advertising pieces. This was a one man's entire collection, over 300 pieces ranging from the 1890s to the 1950s. He had amassed them over the previous thirty years. 99% were fake. Some were good fakes, while many were really poor 1980s color copy quality mounted to old cardboard. The old glue had dried out on some and you could actually see the graphics that were underneith on the original cardboard.

One thing that struck me were the sun faded shapes that were present on the backs of many of the fakes. This can't really be faked - but the graphics applied to the fronts can.

I was going both ways until I took a practical look at how a display header would have been used. When I did a model of the sign and tried to make the cut-out tabs work the way they are supposed to, it doesn't add up to me.

Here is my little exhibit to explain:

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Screen Shot 2021-06-04 at 12.13.58 PM.jpg

Screen Shot 2021-06-04 at 12.14.06 PM.jpg

See what I mean about the graphics and copy being cut off? It kind of defeats the purpose of having a header if you can't read the copy on it. Were there bad designers back in 1935? Absolutely. But a candy company that does many types of products each year that come with displays like this wouldn't have sent this to market designed this way. A competent designer would have designed around the tab problem and included more "empty space" to compensate for the mounting system.

Is this a definitive answer - no, but just more food for thought until someone gets a hold of this thing in real life...

[Butch7999]

Gary raises an excellent point -- yet, might it also explain the rarity, or really uniqueness, of this example?
Is it conceivable this was a test piece, a prototype, which in its day was quickly discovered to be an impractical,
poorly-conceived design, and was tossed back into the company's or the printer's archives without ever
being distributed to shopkeepers, or ever redesigned in a more functional form?
Separately, is it also conceivable it was meant to be suspended from something other than the back end
of a box -- some thin metal rod or something that would've held it just a few inches more visibly aloft?

[ooo-ribay]

Originally Posted by Butch7999

Gary raises an excellent point --

He sure does...

[Hankphenom]

As I posited on this thread on the other side: if you wanted the underside of the box top to provide the display, wouldn't you just print it that way so that when the top was lifted, there's your display? There are many examples of this in the hobby, are there any of some kind of tab configuration as in this case? And have we arrived at a consensus from our printing experts that the manufacturing details of this piece conform to vintage norms, or are we still working on that?

[Hankphenom]

Originally Posted by Hankphenom

As I posited on this thread on the other side: if you wanted the underside of the box top to provide the display, wouldn't you just print it that way so that when the top was lifted, there's your display? There are many examples of this in the hobby, are there any of some kind of tab configuration as in this case? And have we arrived at a consensus from our printing experts that the manufacturing details of this piece conform to vintage norms, or are we still working on that?

Anyone? Bueller?

[jerseygary]

One other thing that looks hinky on this piece is it appears that one of the tabs show creasing on the backside but not on the front. Can't say for sure without having it in my hand, but that's what the pictures appear to show to my eye.

[nolemmings]

Although I guess this could be a fantasy piece in the sense that this specific display was never used in 1934, I find it less and less believable that the product itself did not exist (Baseball Gum), and that the baseball pictures currently catalogued as R310s were not sold with that product. There is an undeniable tie between General Gum and Curtiss Candy–the addresses used for the plant and general offices/HQ both match up. It seems far-fetched to me that someone completely made up a display piece thinking it would be clever to make this connection in hopes that it would be discovered by savvy collectors down the road and falsely used to support claims of authenticity. I suppose it’s possible that Curtiss Candy initially thought to distribute the R310 pictures through its gum affiliate and that it generated prototype advertising that never hit the stores, opting instead to tie the pictures to its Butterfinger candy bars and only those candy bars. If so, I guess that could be construed as a “fantasy” piece in the same vein as phantom World Series tickets– actually from the period and real but never put into commerce.

Gary, while I appreciate your mock-ups and understand your point, these are not particularly persuasive to me. Your re-creation of how the display would appear, assuming it to be accurate, still shows the emphasized portion of the ad. All that seems “cut off” from my view is the second reference to the price of the gum at 1 cent, and the price is already shown prominently front and center, so there is no confusion there. The Ruth premium ad is fully visible. Some small amount of graphics is wasted I suppose, but you are assuming that the piece was only intended to be used as you constructed it. It easily could have been hung or displayed in other ways–there even appear to be staple holes in this example.

It is now known that “Baseball Gum” had some relationship to the distribution of these same pictures in Canada, through O-Pee-Chee. That was not learned until 1997--more than a half century after the fact. It was established by the discovery of one, flimsy, rather non-descript envelope wrapper, which made an offer very similar to the one present in this piece– gum and a picture for a penny. I say that to show that it doesn’t always take much to alter the hobby’s understanding of set origins, and people don’t necessarily bat an eye when information surfaces decades later. So the find of a possible display piece for R310 only this century is not that suspicious, to me anyway.

It is also known that there was a commonality or relationship between General Gum and OPC at the time, as they both issued the magic tricks non-sport set in the early 1930s. In addition, it is known that General Gum issued movie star cards with a mail-in offer for larger photos in 1933. The only thing I see missing is a direct correlation between Baseball Gum and the General Gum Inc., and that link is supplied by this display piece. Unless of course you believe that someone made it out of whole cloth (cardboard) with intent to deceive, and it’s just coincidence that all of these other facts align.