Topps

The Topps Company is an American maker and marketer of trading cards and bubble gum. It began in 1938 as Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., formed by the brothers Abram, Ira, Philip and Joseph Shorin, and was incorporated in 1947, the year it introduced Bazooka Bubble Gum. Topps entered the baseball card business in 1951 and bought its main rival, Bowman Gum, in 1956, which left it with little competition in sports cards until an antitrust case brought by Fleer in the late 1970s opened the field. Management took the firm private in a leveraged buyout in 1984 and it listed again in 1987. Besides cards and gum it has sold comic books, stickers, candy and Pokemon products, with sales in more than 50 countries and licenses from the major North American sports leagues.