I think we are trying to impute 2010 knowledge and logic on 1910 baseball cards. They will NEVER match.
The "marketing" division of ATC (and I use that term loosely) just wanted to sell more tobacco. That's all. Period. If that meant re-using a front image with a different brand back, so be it. If that meant changing a team name, on the title, or on the picture itself, so be it.
I don't think that they envisioned that, 100+ years later, we'd be sitting around trying to classify, sort, and rearrange, their motives. Even when Burdick first did this job, these were "old" cards.
The work done over the years has unearthed an awful lot of "what" ATC did, but, in the end, finding "why" they did something, or even, what they intended to do, will always be a guess.
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Jim Van Brunt
Last edited by Jim VB; 04-12-2010 at 12:34 PM.
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