Quote:
Originally Posted by insidethewrapper
Maybe in the 1920's people were buying and he economy was so good that there was no need to add a baseball card to their product to sell it. In the 1930's during a great depression you would have thought there would have been no cards, but maybe adding a card to the product was needed to make the sale. Just a thought.
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If we are speaking only as to why there are relatively fewer card sets then I believe this is pretty much the answer.
In the 1880's there were major Tobacco producers literally at war with one another and one of the major ways they out sold their competitors was via their inserts. Once Duke formed their monopoly and formed the American Tobacco Co. in 1890 there was no need to invest the tens of thousands of dollars a year into the insert market because they owned the market. At that point we see a precipitous decline in the number of tobacco cards of all kinds being made between the years 1890-1892 all the way until really 1909.
The funny thing is that we think that Tobacco cards just ceased to exist during those years (especially in the baseball card world) but in reality The American Tobacco Co was still churning out millions of tobacco cards every year but they didn't really distribute them within the United States (where they had the monopoly) but outside the USA. These cards are what are in the ACC as T400-T499 cards... cards made and packaged in the USA but distributed in largely other countries (like the T215 Pirate Cigarette cards, which if Burdick had known about he would have assigned them a T400-T499 number)