Was this the first baseball postcard?

[paul]

From the recent Huggins & Scott auction:

https://hugginsandscott.com/cgi-bin/...l?itemid=41811

It was a postcard featuring woodcuts of the 1893 Boston team. I did some research before bidding (I lost) and learned that privately issued postcards were not even legal in the U.S. until 1898. And it seems unlikely that the government issued any baseball postcards before then. This postcard was from Canada, which I assume had more relaxed laws about postcards back then. So what do you think -- could there be an earlier baseball postcard?

[Bicem]

Was the earliest that I had ever seen.

[RCMcKenzie]

Who won it?

Is it from a known wood cut?

I was bidding because of the wood cut, as i don't bid on many postcards.

[BeanTown]

I was under bidder on it. Very cool. I wonder who won it to??????? Hmmmmmm

[steve B]

Postcards were legal pretty much from the start. The first known was handmade in 1840 in England.(It made fun of postal workers, at the time you could mail just about anything.)
Basically it was considered to be a letter, if you happened to write that letter so the content could be seen by anyone that was your own business.
The US government began supplying postal cards with pre-printed postage in 1873. The first picture postcards appeared around the same time.

So about 20 years between some of the early postcards, and the one in the auction.
It's probably the earliest with any sort of picture, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least one advertising card either for equipment, or for a game.

[aelefson]

There was an earlier one discussed on this forum somewhat recently. Here is the link.
https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=171578


Also, Barry posted some earlier ones from 1878 in this link.
https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?p=1838500


Alan

[aquarius31]

It’s not uncommon to see woodcuts transferred into scrapbooks, cigar boxes and other material but a 6”x4” woodcut format is very small. The players names, title etc. also appear to ‘fit’ the postcard. I’ve seen smaller format team woodcuts in 1880s-90s publications just not this particular one.


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