Both sets were very popular when they were first released, especially with kids, though it's hard to quantify exactly how popular. This 1929 article that I posted last year is the most extensive first-person account I know of by somebody who collected Old Judges (along with all kinds of other tobacco cards) as a kid:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=202129
Also, one old-time collector wrote an item for Card Collector's Bulletin in the early 1940s about how he had want lists as a kid in 1890. See also the first article at the following link, about the 1939 U.S. Card Collector's Catalog, in which Jefferson Burdick wrote: "Many old collectors remember the hey-days of 1890 and 1910 when collecting cigarette cards was an almost universal pastime. Prices in those days sometimes soared to 50c and $1.00 for a single badly wanted card. It was something like an auction sale where bidders in their eageness go to fantastic heights and the article is sold at many times its actual value."
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=228520
A fair amount of research has been done on the original reception of T206. Scot Reader's "Inside T206", available at the following link:
http://t206resource.com/Images/Publi...al-edition.pdf
has an account on pages 15-18 of the launch of T206 and the frenzy that followed, based on contemporary newspaper accounts. Here is the key passage from an article in the August 9, 1909 Charlotte Observer:
