Any given day on ebay you can dial up T213 Coupon cards, and you will typically find approx. 200 cards listed. The majority
of them will be T213-2 cards. And, on the average as many as 20 % of them will be T213-3 cards.
Very seldom will you find even one "T213-1" card listed for sale.
It's obvious to me the 1910 COUPON cards were not designed to be inserted in the standard (10-cigarette) pack of that era.
My theory is they were either......
simply handed out to customers purchasing this new ATC brand, or pasted on a 200-count cigarette cartons,, or just placed
inside one of these cartons. In any event, this Willett was most likely the latter case. As it is the best looking 1910 COUPON
card in my collection.
.
Collecting these cards, I have noticed that approx. 10 % (or perhaps as much as 15 %) of them have this type of paper loss
on their backs (which most likely resulted because these cards pasted on cigarette cartons). The repetitive spot-like spoilage
on these cards is too consistent to blame it on some random cause.
.
This one, though, has faint cardboard residue on it from also being pasted on a cigarette carton. Apparently, whoever removed
this card from a carton did it very, very carefully. I've seen very few 1910 COUPON cards (less than 1%) exhibiting this type of
minimal back damage.
.
TED Z
T206 Reference
.