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Originally Posted by Pat R
Greg, as we have discussed before it gets really complicated because the ATL and ALC were associated with or owned so many companies it's hard to keep track of all of them.
I have to go back and find some of the clippings but I'm pretty sure the John Bollman Co. purchased the S. Arnargyros Co. The Bollman Co. created the Obak cigarette brand and I found where the Bollman Co. was actually owned by the American Tobacco Co. There was also another Arnargyros involved in cigarette making that resulted in a lawsuit that went on for quite a length of time.
I also found where Mecca cigarettes another ATC brand were produced by the Imperial Tobacco Co.
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There seems to have been a lot of these ‘fraud’ brands like the second Anargyros, piggy backing off established ATC brands and sub firms. The rejected registrations have a lot of what seem to be these, like “Count Tolstoi”. The real Anargyros and Metropolitan seem to flip flop between being front holding firms and just openly being subsidiary operators of the ATC. There’s so much inconsistency in how the ATC is operating in 1910.
Mecca in Canada is of special interest to me. The Adless version of Mecca’s T218 is labelled a Canadian issue (C52) and many of the cards have come from Canada and the American northeast, but I’ve also got an original batch from a Virginia provenance and I am not yet entirely sold on the general narrative that any T card with a card number in place of advertising is an Imperial Tobacco product. I didn’t come across anything that Turkey Red or Piedmont were actually issued in Canada, the registrations don’t mean they were actually sold there. Worthy of deeper digging
In your dives into Obak, do you have anything in your notes on Pet and Kopec? The west coast brands that released the T224/T229 set closely related to T212. Obak appears a lot in the primary material I’ve been through and seems to have been popular but these brands rarely earn mention. I would assume they were also run by the same people.