Paula Block Erdmann & Terry Erdmann
New Book by Local Authors, Paula Block Erdmann and Terry Erdmann
Remember “bubble gum cards?” You, or your kids, used to go into your favorite store and buy them, not because you wanted the gum, but because you were trying to collect the cards—the entire set of cards. Maybe they showed pictures and stats on professional baseball players, or they had pictures and information about a popular movie, or a TV show. But no matter how many packages of the cards you bought, or how many duplicates you acquired, you could never manage to collect the entire set.
Now the Topps Company, one of the major manufacturers of those cards (and gum) wants to remedy that. They’ve joined with Abrams ComicArts to publish books that reproduce some of their classic card sets, which means that you can get the whole shebang in one package. To date they’ve covered the icky (Garbage Pail Kids), the creepy (Mars Attacks), and the funny (Bazooka Joe). And now they’ve reached the Trekkie—which is where this story finds a Jacksonville connection.
Abrams contacted local writers Paula and Terry Erdmann to create a book about Topps 1976 Star Trek cards. Under their pen names, Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann, the pair have written several books on Star Trek, so they were the publisher’s logical choice of authors.
Star Trek: The Topps Original Trading Card Series arrived in stores about the same date that this issue of the Jacksonville Review hit the streets. It presents the entire set of 
88 cards, front and back, and 22 stickers that were even harder to collect. The Erdmanns wrote commentaries on each card, drawn from interviews they conducted with the former Topps employees who created the set in the ‘70s. These insights give the reader a unique behind-the-scenes look into the world of bubble gum cards.
To top it off, the book includes some fun surprises, like images of the gum that came with the cards, and a dust jacket that’s made from that same waxy paper that the gum and cards came in. Perhaps most fun of all, it rectifies a thirty-seven year old injustice. For some unknown reason, one character, Sulu, played by actor George Takei, did not appear on any of the cards in the original set. But he’s here now, on two of the four brand new bonus cards that the Erdmanns created for the book.
And they wrote it right here in Jacksonville.
Posted September 30, 2013