[mouschi]

I find myself getting lost (and enjoyably so) into researching baseball cards & collectibles from the 19th century. No matter how deeply I look, I am unable to find anything written about several questions I have. If you have time to weigh in on one, several, or all of my questions below, I'd be grateful!

1) I read the thread/argument about what the first baseball card was. I'm trying to find what significance other specific cards were. What about N172 Old Judge cards? Were they the first photographed multi-team "set"? What about N28 Allen & Ginter? Were they the first nationally distributed? I'd love to hear more about what makes these two sets (N172 & N28) significant / what "firsts" they are.

2) It seems that some of the earliest "baseball cards" could be CDVs/Trade Cards/Cabinets/etc. from the 1860s-80s. Basically actual pictures that were mounted onto some sort of backing, with many of them being photographs of whole teams. Aside from the advertising trade cards, what was the purpose for these - were they meant to be collectible by baseball fans? Were they taken to be replicated by woodcut for publications?

3) Regarding these CDV/trade cards/cabinets - how many would generally have been made? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?

4) What about woodcuts from Harpers, Leslies, etc? Were these collected by baseball fans, or were they generally discarded? I'd imagine if the "print run" of items in #3 above wasn't enough to cover all of baseball fandom, the woodcuts would serve largely as the sole collectibles of players for their fans.

I'm sure i have other questions, but I think these are the main things of the top of my head. I look forward to hearing from the Net54 folks on these questions!