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Adams' Pepsin Tutti-Frutti Gum

Railway Automatic Sales Co., Brooklyn, NY, c. 1898, 29 ¹/₂". This is a 2-column gum vendor with porcelain panels that cover both sides and most of the front. I'd seen this model a few times before I bought this one, and was always drawn to it. It's got great graphics and presence. The maker is listed on an inside label as Railway Automatic Sales Co., who obviously made it specifically for Adams. This is considered rare.

The example above is 100% original. Note the method of attachment on this one, which you can partially see in the picture above. Two thick iron bars are attached to the machine's back, and the outer ends of those bars protrude above and below the machine and are attached to the wall. The bottom bar is forked and the nadir of the fork sits on a stud-mounted screw that supports the machine's weight while a screw through a hole in the top bar holds the machine to the wall and keeps it from toppling forward. I was initially worried about the stability of this arrangement but it's solid when mounted into a stud. The only downside to this attachment method is that the machine can move into and away from the wall a bit at the sides, but thus far I've had zero complaints from customers about that.

This is the only example I've seen with painted wood. The other examples I've seen have all had bare wood. Whether those bare-wood examples were painted at some earlier point I don't know, I just know they weren't painted when I saw them. I was surprised to see the paint on this example since nothing I'd seen up to that point caused me to think that the wood was originally painted, but there's no doubt the paint on this one is original.

This specific machine was part of a collection I bought in 2007 and was one of my primary interests in the deal. The collection had other great machines, some of which I still have, but this one really got my juices flowing. A friend owned the collection and we had talked about this machine a year or two earlier before he went to look at it to buy. He was worried about spending a bunch of money on a machine that might not be right, and he asked my opinion on what to look for. Now, he's an experienced collector and would know as well as I did about whether something looked right or not, but he was asking specifically about any known "problems" with this model. I didn't know of any, but told him to call me if he saw the machine and had any specific questions or general concerns. He never called, and when I asked about it the next time we talked he said he hadn't needed to call, he knew with once glance that this thing was right.

Silent Salesmen Too lists another model as "Adams' Pepsin Tutti-Frutti Gum" along with this one on page 130, but the two models listed with that name are quite different in size, design, and presence. You can read more about the smaller 1-column model here and see both models pictured together here. Note the apostrophe after the "Adams" on the 2-column model above but not on the 1-column model. I don't know whether the apostrophe or the lack of apostrophe is the mistake although the apostrophe on another Adams suggests that the one above is correct.