Cigarette Cards Were Packaging Before They Were Collectibles. Probably Not These Ones.

Five of the sets on this site are tobacco issues from the 1880s. The story everybody tells about why they exist is that they were packaging. For three of the five, that explanation runs into a date problem.

The received version goes like this, and you will find it almost everywhere.

Cigarettes in the 1870s came in flimsy paper packs. To stop them being crushed in a pocket, manufacturers slipped in a piece of blank card. Somebody eventually realised that a blank piece of card is wasted advertising space, printed something on it, and a hobby was born by accident.

It is a good story. It is well sourced. And the specific cards this index tracks may not be an example of it.

Why cigarettes suddenly needed packaging at all

Start with the machine, because nothing else makes sense without it.

Until the 1880s cigarettes were rolled by hand. Allen & Ginter offered a prize for a machine that could do it, and in 1880 James Bonsack of Virginia built one. It was unreliable enough that every large manufacturer except one declined to buy it. James Buchanan Duke bought it in 1885.

A hand-roller produced a few thousand cigarettes a day. The Bonsack machine produced them by the hundred thousand.

That changes everything downstream. You now have a product arriving in volumes nobody has handled before, which has to be packed, shipped, and distinguished from a competitor's identical product. Packaging and advertising both become urgent problems in the same decade, for the same reason.

Cards solved both at once, which is why the stiffener story is so satisfying.

The date problem

Here is the objection, and it is specific rather than general.

In 1885, Lewis Ginter introduced the slide and shell box: a two-piece stiff cardboard package that protected cigarettes far better than paper ever had.

Allen & Ginter's card sets came afterwards. N28 was issued in 1887. N29 and N2 in 1888.

Which means that by the time the company started putting cards in packs, it had already spent two years selling cigarettes in a box that did not need stiffening. Researchers who have looked at this argue that the Allen & Ginter cards were not structural at all, and were inserted purely to build brand loyalty.

Three of the five tobacco sets on this index are Allen & Ginter issues, and all three fall on the wrong side of that date.

And a source that says the opposite

We are not going to tidy this up, because the sources genuinely disagree.

An account published by the American Museum of Fly Fishing, writing about the angling card sets of the same era, describes the slide and shell box as requiring a cardboard stiffener between the two rows of cigarettes to stop them being crushed.

So one account says the box removed the need for a stiffener and another says the box created it.

We cannot resolve that from here. What we can say is that the confident version you will read in most places, that these particular cards began as structural packaging, is not established for the Allen & Ginter issues and is disputed by people who have looked closely at the printing and the packaging.

It is also worth noticing how the general and the specific get blurred. Cigarette cards as a category almost certainly did begin as stiffeners in the 1870s. That does not mean every set issued afterwards was one, any more than every modern card is a piece of gum advertising.

What is not in dispute

Several things, and they explain the sets better than the origin argument does.

The cards were an advertising weapon. Complete a set and you had to keep buying the same brand. That is the whole design, and by 1900 there were thousands of sets from around three hundred companies, all doing the same thing to each other.

The subjects were chosen to appeal to men who smoked. Not to children. Actresses, boxers, flags, birds, fish, war, and the American Indian chiefs of the N2 set this index tracks. It reads like an encyclopedia issued one card at a time because that is roughly what it was.

Children collected them anyway. The contemporary detail that sticks is that they would wait outside shops and ask customers who had just bought cigarettes to hand over the card.

And the printing was extraordinary for a giveaway. Chromolithography, multiple colours, on an object slipped free into a five-cent packet.

How it ended

The Second World War stopped it. Paper was rationed and card production was an obvious thing to cut.

Cigarette cards never meaningfully returned afterwards. Collectors in Britain moved to tea cards and collectors in America moved to bubble gum cards, which is the line that runs directly to the 1966 Batman sets and everything else on this index.

So the thing that killed the tobacco card is also, in a sense, what created the modern one.

Why this index holds both

A fair question, given that an 1888 Allen & Ginter chief and a 1977 Star Wars card have almost nothing in common.

The answer is that they are the same object doing the same job. A small printed picture, given away free with something else, in a numbered series designed to make you buy more of the something else. Tobacco, then bread, then bubble gum.

The subjects change and the manufacturers change. The mechanism has not changed in a hundred and forty years.

The thing worth sitting with

The most repeated fact in card collecting is that the whole hobby began as a packaging accident.

It may well be true of the category. It is not clearly true of the cards that made the category famous, because the man who made them had already fixed his packaging and was thinking about something else entirely.

He was thinking about brand loyalty, which is a much less charming origin and a much more accurate one.

This index tracks the 1880s tobacco sets alongside everything that came after, card by card and grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources