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| Wacky Packages with Sticker | 
 enlarge | Authors: Topps Company, Art Spiegelman
Creator: Jay Lynch
Publisher: Abrams Books for Young Readers
Category: Book
List Price: £11.14
Buy New: £10.16
You Save: £0.98 (9%)
New (18) from £6.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 710319
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 081099531X
Dewey Decimal Number: 745
EAN: 9780810995314
ASIN: 081099531X
Publication Date: June 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
Topps for parodies May 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What a treat to see a little corner of American pop culture get a decent looking book. Normally this sort of title would be produced by well meaning amateurs with no professional publishing experience or put out as just one of a cascade of titles from the American collectors press. Abrams seemed to have timed it just right by celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Wacky Packs.
Art Spiegelman in his intro gives a little background to the origins of the idea and I was interested to learn that artist Norm Saunders painted some of the packs, I had always associated him with the over-the-top lurid covers for the pulp men's adventure magazine market of the fifties and sixties. Spiegelman also mentions his affection for Mad magazine and long before he actually worked at Topps Mad had a stab at their own colour product parodies. In their 1959 More Trash reprint a handsome sheet of life-size labels printed on gummed paper was the bonus. Produced to a slightly different criteria than the Topps packs who, after all, had to produce a regular flow of artwork over a short period, the 223 illustrations in the book were issued from 1973 and '74.
Looking through the pages it's amazing to think that they are all well-known national brands firmly fixed in everybody's mind because of advertising. I wonder if any brand ever complained to Topps, probably not but we're hardly likely to find out. Missing from the book, I thought, is some trivia about the series, what was the average print run, are there any rarities and why, were any products turned down for whatever reason or packs printed but junked.
The book's production is rather impressive, from the jacket printed on gum- wrapper paper, the addition of a drop shadow on each pack to lift it off the page to the printing in two hundred screen (usually reserved for expensive art books) to the four bonus stickers inside the back cover. This all makes Wacky Packages a delight to look at.
Strangely there is virtually no reference to the actual gum in the book!
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