When starting a collection of cigarette or trading cards, it may be that a person has a good idea of what they wish that collection to look like; on the other hand, it could be that they are bewildered by the array of themes, card issuers, methods of purchase and technical detail ascribed to the cards. There are millions of cards to choose from, issued all around the world, and a logical thought process at the outset can help to avoid wasted time, money and, even worse, damage to your collection in the future. This chapter is intended as a guide for the new collector, and a reminder of key points for more established cartophilists.
The first piece of advice for the new collector is to purchase a recent price guide. The London Cigarette Card Company publishes a wide-ranging annual catalogue currently priced at £12.50. This covers cigarette and trade cards, including many recently issued sets which they have in stock. The publication also has the advantage of listing a greater range of series including some rare ones which have subsequently been reprinted in recent decades. The prices in the catalogues are based on the cards being in ‘Very Good’ condition. This catalogue can be used as a benchmark against which to price sets or odds which you may come across elsewhere. You may see cards selling for more or less than the listed price. For example, if two collectors are bidding for a particular set simultaneously, this can increase the price dramatically. Another widely-used and respected catalogue is that issued under the name of Martin Murray, the most recent edition of which can be purchased for £10. You may find sets at auction which can be bought more cheaply than the catalogued price, although these tend to be rarer cards rather than the standard popular issues of the 1920s and 1930s. However, the buyer then lacks the convenience of being able to purchase them from the comfort of home and backed up by the integrity of a well-established company name.
Within the card collecting world, the fundamental fact about prices is that an individual card or set of cards is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it and what a seller is willing to accept for it. So all prices given subsequently in this book are a reflection of a consultation of the current catalogues and price guides, and a range of websites of established online trading companies. They are there as a general guide only. Prices of sets and cards fluctuate over time. What you may be willing to pay for cards is a matter for you and the seller.
Most collectors would confirm that the condition of a card is the single most important aspect to consider when making a purchase. ‘Always buy the best quality you can afford’, was the first, and best, piece of advice I received on starting my collection, and this has been reiterated on numerous occasions.
One thing to be wary of is buying from non-specialist sellers who may list a set of cards as being very good ‘considering their age’. This is especially important when buying from general auction sites on the internet. The standard descriptors as defined by the London Cigarette Card Company are:-
| MINT | Uncirculated cards direct from the packet or printer |
| FCC | Finest Collectable Condition – perfect cards which have been handled with extreme care |
| VERY GOOD | Clean undamaged cards with sharp corners, edges showing slight signs of handling |
| GOOD | One or two minor blemishes may be visible, corners may be marked or slightly rounded, no creases. |
| FAIR | Showing signs of considerable handling, such as rounded corners, slight damage along edges or a minor crack |
| POOR | Prominently cracked or with some surface damage, often with rounded corners and a degree of soiling |
| VERY POOR | Cards with serious cracks, a piece missing, soiled, damaged, badly worn or cut |
Other sellers may use slightly different descriptors for the cards they are selling, but the paramount point is to always consider their condition before agreeing a purchase.
You will find yourself spending from tens, to hundreds, to even thousands of pounds on your card collection. However you will still want to enjoy looking at them. Therefore, a secure yet accessible method of storage is required. Simply storing them in an old shoe box risks damage not only to your collection, but to cards which can be enjoyed by generations to come. Most collectors purchase bespoke albums into which clear plastic wallets made with archival safe plastic can be inserted. These wallets come with pockets which can store cards of a variety of shapes and sizes. When inserting your new cards into these wallets, the utmost care must be taken not to crease or chip the edges and corners, thus reducing an Excellent condition card down to a Good one with one careless manoeuvre.
It is also worth establishing a system for cataloguing your collection at an early stage, before it grows into something unwieldy. This may be done chronologically, by theme, or by card issuer. Alternatively, some experienced collectors follow an internationally recognised indexing system, such as the World Tobacco Index (WTI) alphanumeric system. The WTI index assigns a code based on the name of the manufacturer, while the London Cigarette Card Company’s catalogue uses codes which relate to standard reference books such as The British Tobacco Issues Handbook.
It may be from day one that you have a clear theme in mind for your collection, such as cricket, or football, or birds. The following chapters in this book may help in giving some ideas on the enormous variety of subjects covered by the cards. Alternatively you may wish to focus on a particular town or county and collect cards associated with that place. A few collectors indulge in ‘type’ collecting, that is trying to acquire one card from as many series as they can. With that in mind, the best advice is to try to avoid starting with a ‘scattergun’ approach of buying anything and everything that catches the eye, although buying a couple of cheap mixed lots for a few pounds may spark off some ideas to pursue in a more structured fashion. So never rule out following a new line of interest, but try and establish some clear parameters to begin with, as these can be broadened later as your interests and confidence in collecting grow. For example, if you have a passion for cricketing cards, you will find many thousands of cards available on the market. Therefore, depending on your available budget, it might be worth an initial limit of £10 per purchase, or restricting your scope down to a particular county’s cricketers, or a particular era of the game. Once you are confident with the process of searching, buying and compiling a collection, then increasing the range of potential purchases should be considered.
It can be daunting for the new collector to decide on the best means of buying cards. One of the most secure places is via an online postal auction organised by a reputable body such as the CSGB or London Cigarette Card Company. The CSGB hold a bi-monthly auction, while the LCCC has a monthly one for which 1,200 catalogues are printed and distributed. These secure auctions enable collectors to submit a secret bid in the knowledge that the lots have been quality-checked. There are also a number of auction houses which specialise in sales of cards in person, some of the more prominent ones being Tim Davidson’s, SAS, Loddon’s and Roy Davis. One of the main advantages of this method of purchase is that you can physically view the cards before bidding. A buyer’s premium of around 15% is usually added to the price.
You may wish to visit a card trade fair. Not only will you be able to see a wide range of possible purchases, but to talk to the dealers who have a wealth of knowledge to impart. Even if the item you are searching for is not immediately available, they may be able to recommend someone who can source it. Details of some of these events can be found on the CSGB website (www.card-world.co.uk).
One of the easiest and most tempting ways to buy cards is on internet auction sites. While it can be useful to browse these and you may be able to pick up an unexpected bargain, many sellers are non-specialist traders and will not always use the condition guide mentioned above. If you are tempted to buy online, then make sure you get a scan of the back as well as the front of the card and apply the condition criteria used by seasoned cartophilists, rather than a non-specialist’s view. It may be that the quality of the card is of less importance to you than the content, but a careful check of exactly what you are buying should be undertaken. In short, caveat emptor!
For those wishing to purchase cards of a greater value or scarcity, possibly as an investment, or if you think a card in your collection is of potential financial value, the PSA grading system is something that should be borne in mind. Standing for Professional Sports Authenticator, any potentially valuable card can be sent to them for a grading on a 10-point scale based on provenance and quality. The organisation, which also authenticates sports autographs and other memorabilia, will assign a unique barcode and place the card in a sealed container to prevent further tampering. There is a sliding scale of fees for this service, and a clear process to follow, more details of which can be found at www.psacard.com.
The Cartophilic Society of Great Britain currently has around 1,000 members and hosts a forum on its website on which a wide range of issues relating to cigarette card collecting are discussed. Before making any major decisions about collecting, purchasing and storing cards, I would recommend seeking out the advice of members with centuries of combined card collecting experience behind them. In addition, the society publishes regular magazines and other specialist studies and has regional groups throughout the country for collectors to meet up and share their passion. They also possess a good library of books and magazines relating to card collection, and these can be lent out to members upon request.
The most widely acclaimed British collector was Edward Wharton-Tigar MBE, a remarkable character on many fronts. Dorothy Bagnall, daughter of Charles Bagnall, founder of the LCCC, recalled him in the early 1930s ‘as a young schoolboy, spending his precious half-holidays visiting my father for the purpose of acquiring cards, often earning them, when pocket money had run out, by sorting, listing and other helpful assistance.’ One of the founders of the Cartophilic Society in 1938, prior to the outbreak of war, Wharton-Tigar worked in Yugoslavia for a mining company, before being selected to serve in the elite Special Operations Executive, the forerunner of today’s SAS. He was instrumental in an explosion to destroy a Cliffside house in Tangier, Morocco, from which the Germans had been using infrared equipment to track shipping going through the Straits of Gibraltar to pass onto their own submarines. He also organised Operation Remorse, a black-market trading operation in currency and jewels in Asia to raise funds for the Allied cause.
Following the war, Wharton-Tigar re-entered the mining industry, rising to managing director of his company before retiring in his early 70s to devote more time to his card collection. In 1994, shortly before his death, Wharton-Tigar gave an interview to The Independent newspaper. He claimed to have collected over a million cards since beginning the hobby back in 1917, aged just 4, when his father, a heavy smoker, gave him his first card. He recalled getting into trouble with his mother, also an avid collector, when he traded her valuable stamp collection to purchase further cigarette and trading cards.
Wharton-Tigar said that he had had to move to a new house specifically to store and curate his enormous collection of cards, as they were taking up two whole rooms from floor to ceiling in his existing one. He commented, ‘I think collectors’ mania is hereditary. My mother had it and so did my grandmother. If you have it, you have it. There is simply nothing you can do about it. You are driven by this desire to complete things.’ He even claimed to have known people who had stolen cards in order to complete certain sets, a temptation he resisted as he was able to buy them. His collection ran to 50,000 full sets, half of them issued with tobacco products, and Wharton-Tigar revealed that his general knowledge had been greatly expanded by his collection. ‘For example, I can tell you what a mushroom ring is. It’s when mushrooms die and fall down and go into a ring. I can even tell you how the Union Jack originated or the origin of Marble Arch. Did you know it was originally an entrance to Buckingham Palace?’ These questions are part of the Do You Know? set, which came with Gold Flake cigarettes.
Wharton-Tigar’s days following retirement were almost exclusively devoted to his cards, with him spending from 8 am through to about midnight sorting and cataloguing his collection. He commented, ‘I do try to lead a normal life though, inviting friends and things, but I think about my collection a lot. In fact I constantly dream about it and I have the most awful nightmares about how I’m going to mount it.’
The anxiety about mounting them was driven by the fact that the British Museum had agreed to accept the collection on his death in order to make it available to the general public, with David Attenborough, a trustee of the museum, being instrumental in this move. With that donation, Wharton-Tigar hoped that the collecting fixation would end in his family: ‘I’m jolly glad my daughters haven’t inherited my mania. They might want me to leave the cards to them and they’re not certainly not getting them.’
He concluded, ‘My wife tolerates what I do, but she does grumble a bit I suppose, because she’s really not interested in it. But it’s really such an intriguing way to spend one’s life. If I dropped dead tomorrow I would feel I had completed something. Or at least almost completed it. One is never totally finished in this business, is one? I’d say, apart from my marriage, my cards are the most important thing in my life.’
On his death in 1995, Wharton-Tigar’s collection was bequeathed to the British Museum, as he had wished, where it is preserved for posterity.
The American Jefferson Burdick (1900-63) is often referred to as the ‘father of card collecting’, being the originator of the Burdick system for cataloguing card issues. Like Wharton-Tigar, Burdick spent a considerable part of his final years organising his 306,353-card collection for donation to a public body, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Burdick started his collection aged 10 and found a compulsion to continually expand it and complete as many sets as possible. Like Wharton-Tigar, Burdick also worked in the mining industry, in his case assembling intricate electrical connections for use in mines and other workplaces. However he began to develop arthritis at a relatively early age, making it difficult for him to put a hat on his head, never mind carefully mount his card collection. Burdick collected cards issued with many types of products as well as cigarettes, chewing gum and chocolate being just two examples.
On donating his collection, he glued the cards into albums as he did not want to see the collection disaggregated at a future date after his death. His collection runs to 394 albums, but at present only a small proportion is on public display, with access only given to ‘serious researchers’ by appointment.
The collection is accompanied by a guide compiled by Burdick and the then director of the museum, A. Hyatt Mayor. Mayor writes of the completion of Burdick’s work:
On the 10th of January 1963, he told us at five o’clock that he had mounted his last card. As he twisted himself into his overcoat he seemed suddenly tired. When he bade us goodbye, he added ‘I shan’t be back.’ The next day he walked from his hotel on Madison Avenue at 26th Street to the nearby University Hospital, where almost exactly two months later, he died... On first meeting, one felt sorry for this racked, frail man, with black-lashed eyes of a haunting gray violet, but pity quickly gave way to admiration - even envy - at his making so much of so bad a bargain. All in all, he triumphed more than many.
There are few collectors today who collect exclusively cigarette cards. Anyone who might have begun a collection as a child by acquiring cigarette cards from adults would have been born around 1930, and therefore well into their late 80s by now. As cigarette cards were replaced by general trade cards from the 1950s onwards, and as trading cards started to become more widespread from the 1970s onwards, so new collectors have come to the hobby via these mediums.
People born in the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s may well have come to the card collecting hobby via the swapping of Topps and Panini football cards and stickers, in the school playground, or from the collection of other ephemera such as stamps or postcards. For example, Graeme Swinbourne, a collector from Lincolnshire, began card collecting at school, spending his pocket money on football cards issued by A&BC and Topps bubble gum at between 2p and 5p per pack. At the same time, he was amassing a collection of old stamps. Like many of his generation, as his disposable income started to increase through his 20s, he began to collect cigarette cards related to his passion for cricket, starting with the Wills’ sets from the late 1920s. From there, his collection blossomed into football and general sporting themes. As an attendee at auctions and trade fairs, Graeme also collects card sets which take his fancy on a broad range of themes.
Sam Whiting is a collector from the next generation along, being born in the mid-1980s. Sam initially began by collecting WWF stickers and Pokémon cards as a schoolboy, before finding a tin of old cigarette cards in his grandfather’s attic. He noticed that some of the sets were nearly complete, requiring just one or two cards to finish them. In an era just before online auction sites, Sam used to scour antiques and collectables shops to find the missing cards. His collection has broadened over the years to include many themes, with a particular focus on ornithological sets. According to Sam, ‘collecting is in my nature I suppose. It’s just a great feeling completing any series – especially when it’s taken several years.’ He is also a member of the CSGB, acting as the society’s webmaster, and is an active member of the Yorkshire branch of the society.
Cartophily is a hobby that has as many variations as there are individual collectors. It may be something you return to intermittently or it can be a daily ritual to enjoy your cards and search for additions to your collection. It can focus on any theme, manufacturer, decade or geographical area you wish. Most collectors I have spoken with tend to begin accumulating cards based on a particular topic. Therefore the following chapters will take some of the broad themes people tend to base their collections around. They aim to give a flavour of the range of possibilities within each area, and to cover some of the main sets issued. It is a personal selection, and some collectors may wince at the absence of a particularly favoured card or set within their area of interest. This is not an authoritative list; catalogues and specialist niche publications exist to cater for that purpose. Rather, this account will show how an individual journey through the world of cards can be undertaken, and may inspire new people to take up the hobby of cartophily.