Carter Hoffman mascots are listed for sale inside the front cover of this 1954 Ivy League football program.

Hoffman was a well-known artist from Los Angeles who made these hand carved mascots for various Ivy League and other colleges in the 1950s. Hoffman also did some mascots for professional sports teams and even some lesser know and more obscure schools. Sold under the name “Carter Hoffman Artcraft” they have become highly collectible. A brochure from the 1950s lists over 120 different schools that they made mascots for.

The mascots are also featured on this Yale-Uconn 1952 program cover. The mascots were available in two sizes, the normal size (catalog item #7) and larger size, called jumbo (listed in the catalog as #8).

The rare Princeton tiger mascot seen above

The now defunct Dartmouth Indian mascot from the 1950s

The company also made bottle pour spouts which replace a cork that has been pulled. The bottles contain the school mascot on the top.

The John Harvard bottle pour stop mascot, above and statue below.

The mascots were produced with two marking on the bottom. One was the name of the mascot. In the example below, it shows the “Dartmouth Indian”. Because these were paper labels, often they are now missing. The other marking is stamped in black ink “Carter Hoffman Original.”

Two pages from an original Carter Hoffman catalog are seen below, showing the location of the business in Glendale, California. The mascots and wine stoppers sold for $24 a dozen wholesale, the jumbo mascots for $7.50 each.

Carter Hoffman items are sought after by collectors and are difficult to find. There is an active market for them. We occasionally have some in inventory on our website