Allen & Ginter Published an Encyclopedia One Cigarette Card at a Time

Between 1887 and 1890 a tobacco company in Richmond, Virginia, issued dozens of card series on almost every subject a nineteenth-century reader might want to know about. Taken together they amount to an encyclopedia, published one cigarette packet at a time, with an index printed on the reverse of every page.

This index tracks three of those series. They make more sense seen as part of the whole.

What they covered

Here is a partial list of the series Allen & Ginter issued in a little over three years, each identified by the number Jefferson Burdick later gave it.

Nature: Birds of America, Game Birds, Song Birds of the World, Fish from American Waters, Quadrupeds, wild animals, even Prize and Game Chickens.

Nations and power: Flags of All Nations, Naval Flags, the World's Sovereigns, the World's Decorations, and the government and state capitol buildings of the United States.

People: the Celebrated American Indian Chiefs, the World's Champions across baseball, boxing, rowing, skating and more, the World's Beauties, and the World's Racers.

And the ones that tell you most about who was buying: the World's Dudes, a series of fashionable young men; the Parasol Drill, a series of women performing drill manoeuvres with parasols; Racing Colors of the World; and, for a cigarette company, perhaps inevitably, the World's Smokers, fifty smokers from around the world.

Pirates and Fruits were in there too.

The detail that made it an encyclopedia

Many of these cards did not just carry a picture and a brand on the reverse. They carried the complete checklist of the series.

The Met's records of the Fish from American Waters cards show the back reading, in effect: fifty fish from American waters, you will catch one in each box of ten cigarettes, followed by the names of all fifty. The World's Smokers backs do the same. So does a larger Fish series packed in boxes of twenty Richmond Straight Cut.

That turned each card into two things at once. It was an entry, a single fish or flag or chief, and it was the table of contents for the volume it belonged to. Anybody holding one knew exactly how many more there were and what they were called.

Which is also exactly what a cigarette company wanted them to know.

Why a tobacco firm did this

We have written about whether cigarette cards began as packaging, and argued that for Allen & Ginter specifically they were a device for loyalty rather than a stiffener. The breadth of the series is the strongest evidence for that.

A single set of fifty keeps a customer buying one brand until the set is done. A catalogue of dozens of sets, each announcing its own completeness on every card, keeps him buying indefinitely. The subjects were chosen to appeal to adult men who smoked: champions, sovereigns, beauties, flags, game birds. Children, famously, collected them anyway.

The albums

The company also issued albums reproducing the cards of a series, printed in colour on heavy paper. The 1888 album for Birds of America was made in the shape of a birdcage, tied at the top with a silk tassel, its pages showing the cards set against exotic painted scenery.

An album is where an encyclopedia stops being a pile of loose entries and becomes a book. Allen & Ginter was selling both.

Who printed them

This was chromolithography, the colour printing process that had spread through every American city by the end of the 1880s. Allen & Ginter used more than one firm. The New York printers Lindner, Eddy & Clauss produced its cards and posters, and the Met credits George S. Harris & Sons of Philadelphia as lithographer on others, including the birdcage album.

The quality is the reason these small cards, about an inch and a half by two and three-quarters, are still collected as images rather than just as curiosities.

Why it stopped

In 1890 Allen & Ginter merged with four other manufacturers to form the American Tobacco Company under James Buchanan Duke. The firm's independent series ended with it. Lewis Ginter took a seat on the new company's board.

The name came back more than a century later, when Topps revived Allen & Ginter in 2006 as a brand of baseball cards that deliberately mixes athletes with oddities, much as the original did.

Where the cards ended up

Many of the examples described here sit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the collection of Jefferson Burdick, the man who numbered them. The N in N2, N28 and N29 is his: the category he gave to nineteenth-century tobacco issues. We have written about the electrician who catalogued every card on our sister site.

The thing worth sitting with

A Richmond tobacco firm set out to make men keep buying the same cigarettes, and did it by printing a small encyclopedia of the world, fifty entries at a time, with the index on the back of every page.

The cigarettes are long gone. The encyclopedia is in the Met.

This index tracks the Allen & Ginter Chiefs and World's Champions series alongside every other set, card by card and grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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