Posted By:
PaulI think there is no question that many postcards are baseball cards under most people's definition. Most people collect Exhibits and Novelty Cutlery postcards as cards.
I think there is a lot more division about "real photo postcards." A real photo postcard is often nothing more than a photograph that was printed by the local film developer with a postcard back at the request of the guy who brought the film in. It's hard for me to distinguish this from a photograph that was printed with no back at all.
There may be instances where a team or other distributor decided to make a set of baseball cards to sell (or to give away) and chose the "real photo postcard" format because it was cheap. But it's real hard to know if that's what occurred with the Josh Gibson. Based on the description of the Gibson, the seller certainly wants everyone to think this is the case. But I'm not sure how you could really know. The presence of someone's name on the postcard (supposedly the distributor) is a point in favor of the postcard being meant for public consumption, but I don't think it's definitive.