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Posted By: E, Daniel

I agree JK that 'cross' interest was both possible and likely back through pre-vintage times, but that doesn't get away from 'primary' intent. Much as today if you had a company - let's say Topps, and a successful product like baseball cards, might you create a card that could be used as a postcard as well - as a novelty? Absolutely. You're making your money from a defined market with semi defined demand and a somewhat definable yearly income. Postcards? Well, demand has really dropped with electronic media and telecommunications, so you don't exactly want to plan your business model around surviving off the vagaries of peoples interest in this dying medium when it runs secondary in your planning, design, marketing and market place annalysis. An interesting addition to your business that doesn't cost you much to duplicate? Sure. Good business sense? Not so sure.
Now the reverse. In the 1905s through 1940s, you have a company that produces postcards and the demand is definable - in the millions and millions and millions, people across the world mainly correspond through the written word, and postcards, letters, lettergrams, are THE media. Sure you know baseball cards have been successful additions to the tobacco market and candy market (other foods as well) - although HOW successful is debatable with the disappearance of most of those tobacco companies, but how do you measure the collector community of the time and the likelihood that the expenses you incur in producing postcards that double as baseball cards will be comfortably turned into profit by a collector whose tastes you probably don't fully understand, and format that is different clearly to that used in most baseball cards in T, N, etc. form? Do you really build a business around that.
And if we're being honest, we should also acknowledge that 'collecting' stuff has been legitimized/given a fresh face in only recent decades, and that before then most such collectors were more likely to be considered horders and eccentrics. Stamps and coins were fairly accepted, furniture for the hoy poloy, but after that........how many people collected and shared their love of dutch porcelain? Or silver matchsafes? Or any of the other collecting hobbies so much more widely enjoyed today.

Per your comment regarding blank postcards, I would simply hazard a guess at this. There were probably 100-200 postcard collectors of the time, who put together GIANT collections, that through the years have been broken down and re-sold in various catagories. That doens't mean I don't think loads of people didn't scrap book and keep all kinds of ephemera that interested them including postcards in them, but my genuine belief is that the number of hardcore pc collectors who specialized in baseball or sports was relatively miniscule, and that the last 10 years has produced the real 'backbone' of that part of the hobby community.

JMO


Regards
Daniel