Tar Very Much

Cigarette or tobacco cards began in the mid-19th century as premiums, enclosed in product packaging.

They were usually issued in numbered series of twenty-five, fifty, or larger runs to be collected, spurring subsequent purchases of the same brand.

Typically, these small cards feature illustrations on one side with related information and advertising text on the other. The height of cigarette card popularity occurred in the early decades of the 20th century, when tobacco companies around the world issued card sets in an encyclopaedic range of subjects.

After a slump during the First World War, popularity resumed, with new emphasis on film stars, sports, and military topics. Plants, animals, and monuments of the world remained perennially favourite themes.

While most cards were produced by conventional offset or other economical commercial printing processes, a few series were issued as original gelatin silver photographs or printed on silk or linen fabric; others were created as puzzles or paper toy cut-outs.

The appeal of contemporary cigarette cards fell by the 1950s, ceasing their production and distribution.

Thanks to the decision by the New York Public Library (NYPL)to open up their digital archives to the public domain just this year (2016) the Library's extensive, international collection of tobacco cards, which now numbers more than 125,000 individual items, including more than 3000 complete sets is now available for unrestricted use.

Most acknowledgements in the donations are in the name of George Arents, He did not collect cigarette cards but provided an endowment for the continued growth of his comprehensive collection on tobacco (whose processing and packaging had provided his fortune), which he had begun donating to NYPL in 1944.

 In addition to literature and artworks, the tobacco collection's scope has come to encompass a wide range of visual materials and printed ephemera associated with that commodity. The cigarette cards were acquired by curators in the 1960s and later .

The number of Tobacco and Cigarette companies producing collectors cards in the halcyon days of the genre is indicative of the popularity of smoking amongst the population at large and prior to the knowledge of the risks to health of nicotine and tar constituents.

Some of the names are still around today including the global concerns of John Player, Wills, British and American Tobacco, Lambert and Butler  and others are deeply rooted in popular culture even if no longer trading such as Capstan, Pirate, Copain, Mitchells and the evocative sounding Churchman.

The cigarette cards covered many topics and subjects and with my compilation of a brief A to Z being representative of a very small proportion of the total breadth and depth of studies.

Actresses, Birds, Cricket Players, Dogs, Eggs,Feminine Beauty, Gods, History, Insignia, Jockeys, Kings of England, Legends, Motorcycle Racing, Natural History, Ocean Liners, Paintings, Queens, Race Horses, Stagecoaches, Theatres, Undressing, Vehicles, World War 2, X-rated, Yachts and Zoos.

The more obscure collections include racism, family violence, banana peels, wombats, turnstiles, spanking, poor persons, see saws, robberies and dingos.

The cards also teased and titillated with some pretty risque posed photographs of ladies undressing, models posing and a lovely lady below from Peru messing about on her flower clad bicycle.

Almost makes you want to take up smoking..................................or cycling in South America.

                      (Photo reproduced gratefully from the New York Public Library Archives)