At the end of my post yesterday regarding the Arbuckle Coffee connection to the Young Folks Painting Book, I mentioned that other Tuck books also appeared in the Arbuckle premium lists. Here’s all the additional information I have.
A much larger book, The Comic ABC Painting Book, was also offered (as item Number 11) by Arbuckle in the same list (good through May 31, 1896). It also required submission of a 2-cent stamp, but required 10 Arbuckle signatures (“proofs of purchase”). (Sorry about the missing chunk, but my copy of that list happens to be torn right at that point!)
Then, in a premium list that was valid from June 1, 1898, through May 31, 1899, 8 additional Tuck books were offered, all from various Father Tuck series. These were Numbers 20 through 27 (out of 50) in that list.
Similar books in TuckDB:
Mother Goose
Little Boy Blue
Puss in Boots
Little Bo-Peep
Little Red Riding Hood
Cinderella
Fur and Feather
Birds in Their Homes
Note that the links I’ve provided above are to similar books in TuckDB, but there do appear to be some differences in the books that Arbuckle offered. The main difference appears to be that most of the books I’ve linked to, above, are described as “Softcover Book”. There are also entries in TuckDB for essentially identical books described as “Untearable Linen”. However, the descriptions in the Arbuckle premium list state either “strong board binding” or “stiff board”. I couldn’t find comparably bound books in TuckDB. So, it would seem that either there’s another entire category of these books not covered in TuckDB, or else the binding descriptions in one or the other source is erroneous.
It also appears that the front covers of at least a few of the books offered by Arbuckle don’t seem to have the Father Tuck series name, or any other Tuck identification, printed on the cover. However, because of the way the books overlap in the Arbuckle list, it’s impossible to see the entirety of each of the eight.
It’s possible that other Tuck books were offered by Arbuckle as mail-order premiums in the late 1890s, but my collection is lacking a few of the premium lists for that period, so I have no idea what may be in them. In any event, from about 1900 onward, Tuck books seem to have disappeared from the Arbuckle offerings altogether, so perhaps they weren’t all that popular!