storing tobacco cards in the old days

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Posted By: pat

any thoughts on how people stored tobacco cards in the old days. for instance last year i was at an antique auction and inside the top drawer of a hutch was a group of about 15 tobacco cards. the hutch (and cards inside) went for about 1500 bucks. now since i know just about nothing about these things, i didnt bid. now just recently my girlfreind's friend at work had a father who died. i found out that his father's father worked for american tobacco co way back when. so i figure anything the grandfather had would have gone to the father already. now right off the bat she mentioned that she didnt find any cards yet while looking through the house, etc. she has to dispose of the estate. now she apparently has tons of books. so i mentioned that back then i would think that people may store the cards in books to keep them relatively safe. obviously before plastics so how else were these things stored? any thougts.

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Posted By: Keith O'Leary

You're right, you can find them anywhere. In albums, in cigar boxes, in desk drawers, between the pages of a book, in a picture frame.

I'd go through that stuff with a fine toothed comb. Anything related to the American Tobacco Co would be of value.

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Posted By: T206Collector

...I purchased a complete set of English Cricketers tobacco cards from the 1930's at an antique show a few months back. The set was housed in the pages of a booklet that was specifically designed to hold tobacco cards -- it had small rectangular spaces, with cuts in the paper at each corner to slot the corners of the cards in. It is very lovely. But I have never seen something like that for american tobacco cards...

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Via my website I was contacted by a London England bookstore owner who found about 40 baseball cards in the pages of an old book. She sent me pictures for identification and they were Old Judges and N300 Mayos. Beat up but including Hall of Famers and a few OJ poses not listed in the Standard Catalog.

The kind of funny thing was the bookstore owner didn't have a scanner, and she Xeroxed the cards and mailed the Xeroxes to me.

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Posted By: Rob NYC

When did they exactly make the plastic holders to hold tobacco cards? And if possible, please provide documentation. Thanx.

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Posted By: Bob

Rob- I was thinking you started seeing them about the time of the Donruss and Fleer exposion in 1981 but they were the kind that leaked chemicals (supposedly) and attempts began to make better, clearer pages without those nasty plasticizers. It's quite possible that earlier pages and holders emerged in the mid-70s but I am not positive.

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Posted By: jay behrens

plastic pages had to exist in the 70s because I remember in 1980 Rotman's advertizing non-PVC plastic pages.

Jay

I like to sit outside, drink beer and yell at people. If I did this at home, I would be arrested. So, I go to baseball games and fit right in.

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Posted By: Mark Macrae

Plastic sheets for baseball cards evolved from the clear sheets which were made for storing photographs in the early 70's. Around '73, I remember buying a small binder (at Toys R Us) with logos of the Major League teams on the cover & it contained about 5 or 6 nine pocket pages with sheets manufactured by K & M in Southern California. I don't recall seeing much competition for a couple years, but by the late 70's there were a handful of companies pushing sheets. Almost all were PVC, and could damage your cards (in a number of ways) over time. Prior to the availability of these sheets, many collectors used photo corners in scrapbooks, pasted, glued or taped their cards into books. Some simply stored them in boxes, but you couldn't really look at them that well in boxes. There was actually a guy from Tennessee that made sheets that would hold around 100 cards (Around 1976) . They were designed to hang on a wall. Fortunately this design didn't take off