The first article on card collecting?

[jason.1969]

Any guesses as to how to play "pitching cards?" If all have the same back, I suppose a game like Memory could work.

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[tim_uk]

So, continuing to stray a step away from card collecting, there are actually lots of old newspaper cuttings on-line. The ancestry.com archive (newspapers.com) is full of them! A 7-day free trial is available, but remember to cancel before 7 days are up (unless you get hooked) .....

Here's a couple of early ones that looked interesting..

1. 1886 September 30 - A 'baseball' article, for the purists....

1886 30 Sept.jpg

plus an example screenshot of some of these cards (not from the newspaper)

Blackstockings.jpg

2. 1890 June 8 - And the threat of the removal of cigarette cards, due to the disproportionate lithographic printing costs (including "base-ball players") …..

1890 8 June.jpg

[Joe_G.]

Great find Tim, there certainly is a lot to be studied. The "young lady cigarette maker" cabinets are often found with a "Crop of 1884" mount. A&G has period literature that states they cured their tobacco 3 years before rolling it into cigarettes and I have thus always dated them to 1887 but your news clipping find suggests they were available by late 1886.

I recently did a deep dive into some Tobacco Journals and posted some of my A&G findings here: www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=256798

I also wrote an article for Old Cardboard (issue #34) that covers far more than just the A&G issues based on what the same journal had to offer. http://www.oldcardboard.com/misc/issue34/issue34.asp

[tim_uk]

Joe - your post makes really interesting reading.

1. Definitive issue dates

Your research on A&G issues dates is fascinating and ground-breaking (I assume!). I had no idea this sort of work had been carried out. And the cross-reference from David Kathman to CCB (December 1941) and Harry Lillien's additional analysis from "Tobacco" (same journal as your reference, I believe) is another great linkage of two disparate lines of enquiry. I will see what's available from CSGB World Index etc, when I get a minute, to see whether some of the early researchers in the UK such as Edward Wharton-Tigar, made any definitive findings, similar to these, to add to your superb timeline chart.

On an unrelated matter, I don't think Old Cardboard will be printing issues anymore - its all on-line - which is shame. Not sure if a definite decision has been made on this.

2. Relative scarcity - Tom Boblitt's PSA analysis

The linked PSA grading analysis showing Large/Small ratios and relative scarcity/abundance on the A&G N series, is also something I've never seen before. The US card collecting hobby is definitely ahead of the UK hobby in this respect.

In addition to your shrewd observation on Large/Small ratios, I think:
a) High quality cards will be more frequently graded, so actual grade distributions will be disappointingly lower than the PSA table, I strongly suspect
b) Rarer cards will be more frequently graded, so I suspect the scarcity graph of individual issues overstates the relative availability of the scarce sets (also disappointingly). In other words the scarce sets will probably be even scarcer in reality.
c) Attractive sets (eg with baseball cards in them) will tend to be graded more frequently than other cards. So attractive cards will also be scarcer in practice than the PSA relative frequency suggests (also disappointingly).

You may be able to tell that maths is my background....

Is this data publically available for analysis, or does Tom have some form of special access to make these cross-tab summaries?

More early articles / snippets will help tie up more of these loose ends / threads, I suspect. We still have a big gap in our card collecting history to fill .......