What is a cigarette card?

The

cigarette card is a small piece of card originally designed to protect cigarettes that were in the paper cover. Manufacturers later came up with the idea of ​​printing promotional reports on cards. Finally, they created a number of designs that allow collectors to try to build a complete set. The idea of ​​collecting sady sets followed in the 90s of the 20th century and was popular for most of the next 50 years. The cigarette card became less popular after World War II, when production was slowed or even forbidden to save resources. Several sets made during both world wars are now highly valued by collectors. Hobby has changed over the years because new card sets are much more rare today than in previous years. Instead of bacigarets that receive new cards, collectors are more likely to hunt old cards. Since they are more rare, collectors will pay high amounts, especially for the completion of the series.

The most popular reference material for cigarette card collectors is Murray's guide for cigarettes and other trading cards , which states sets of cards and details such as size, number and value, both for the whole set and for each card. Some of the more valuable cards are those that contain a mistake and have been replaced after the release. It is generally believed that some manufacturers have issued different cards in different quantities to buy cigarettes to try to get rarer cards. For this reason, some individual cards in the set today may be much more expensive among retailers.

The most famous cigarette collector in history was a man named Edward Wharton Tiger. When died in 1995, he left the collection of more than a million cards to the British Museum. This included an extremely rare card with a baseball player Honus Wagner, who forced producers to withdraw the card from circulation when he was against smoking.

cigarette cards are collected in the same way as bassEball cards, the main difference is that baseball cards are usually sold either separately or with a piece of rubber, while cigarette cards were usually available with cigarette packages. Other similar promotion techniques in some countries include card packages, while in Europe children are more likely to collected stickers.