When you get to early baseball cards, there's a lot of gray area, unanswerable questions, philosophy and personal sentiment. It's baseball card theory.
Many early CDVs of famous people were indeed marketed and sold to the public by the photographer, and famous people often handed out CDVs of themselves to general public fans. I've seen photographer advertising and order letters between famous people and studios that document this. Charles Dickens, as one example, ordered CDVs that he would send to fans who wrote to him. Those CDVs were definitely intended to be collected or otherwise kept as souvenirs or mementos. It also says you could own a Dickens CDV that was owned by Dickens.
Last edited by drc; 02-09-2013 at 11:56 AM.
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