Scott- assuming I understand your question, because most of the Cincinnati Red Stocking cards that have survived contain various product advertising, such as the Peck and Snyder Sportings Goods store, or for Henry Chadwick's book The Game of Baseball, of course those were distributed to as large an audience as possible. When you have a product to sell, you want to get the word out to the public. In the case of the Atlantics CdV, because there is no product advertising, coupled with the fact that only a single one has survived (save the Library of Congress example), that suggests that a limited supply of them were available. Do we know for a fact the general public couldn't buy one of them? No. Is it reasonable to think they weren't able to? That's my opinion.
We don't know enough about how CdV's were distributed and circulated. Most were not available to the public. Some were.
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