Victorian Trade Cards

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Extreme Shipping: When Express Delivery to California Meant 100 Grueling Days at Sea

At the frenzied height of our current technological gold rush, the denizens of America's West Coast cities can have almost anything delivered within 24 hours—food, toilet paper, shoes, marijuana, and so on. But during California’s first boom, it typically took more than 100 days for goods or people to reach San Francisco from the East Coast. Getting there at all was a death-defying feat. "It sounds romantic, but I think it was a rather miserable existence for everyone.” These harrowing...

Some Trade Cards and Broadsides

American advertising has always told a rousing story. What people had and what they could acquire. From the first issue of the Boston News Letter to 1942, this advertising has been an accurate, contemporary record. Type and pictures consummated merchandising arguments. Our newspaper advertising has been carefully culled and books of quotations have resulted. But the trade cards, the direct mail and notice board advertising of their time, have largely been ignored by antiquarians. [caption...

Hitting a Home Run with Baseball Cards

I started collecting in 1986. If you’re in Boston and you’re a baseball fan, the Red Sox may take over your life. They take over your life in a way that other teams don’t. With the Red Sox, I was so used to everything being terrible. They’d get your hopes up and then they crush your will to live. So collecting cards grew from that appreciation. It became an easy way for me to harness OCD and my love of baseball. I got cards as a Christmas present in 1986 when I was 7 and was immediately...

The Force of Collecting Star Wars Cards

In this interview, Paul Holstein talks about collecting Star Wars cards, from finding obscure cards to completing and grading full sets. I was 10 when the movie came out and I went to the store and bought a couple of packs of Star Wars cards. But I ended up trashing all the cards I had when I was a kid, and in my collection today I have none of the cards that I had then. They all went to the garbage, but later on down the road, seven or eight years ago, in my early 30s, I started...

Selling Soap and Smokes With Victorian Trade Cards

How did I start collecting Victorian trade cards? In the late 60s I was a bottle collector, early American bottles and flasks. I started noticing there were colorful trade cards that advertised the medicines, often with preposterous claims about their curative powers. You could pick these cards up for 10 cents or so, so I started collecting them with the bottles. I just became more and more interested in the trade cards. I continued collecting bottles for another 15 years but eventually as...

19th-Century Tobacco Cards

Dave Campbell contacted me after reading a post on The Baseball Card blog. He's been collecting baseball cards non-stop since 1981. He has recently created a collection of 19th century Allen & Ginter cards. I talked with him at length about how he got interested in these cards and what it took to assemble the collection. : What prompted you to begin collecting 1880's Allen & Ginter cards? : I'm a big fan of retro-style baseball cards. For the past few years, Topps has taken a...