Cigarette Cards

[room]

I came across an inexpensive used paperback of this book:

"A Cigarette Card History of the Generals & Admirals of the Civil War"
by Templegate Publishing, J B Duke Co (Author)


Here is the description:

Shortly after the Civil War, James B. Duke took over his father Washington Duke's tobacco company which grew so rapidly that by the late 1880's he virtually controlled the U.S. tobacco industry and in 1890 he founded the American Tobacco Company. Among his promotional gimmicks in 1888 was the insertion into each of his cigarette packages of miniature brochures containing a color portrait, facsimile signature and biography of one of 50 Civil War generals or admirals. He knew that there would be intense competition among his customers to buy more packages and eventually acquire a complete set and he was right. Thus began one of the earliest hobbies of popular collecting. Few complete sets survive but this book opens the entire collection for everyone to enjoy.

So I bought this to go with my books, Fandex, and playing cards on the Civil War.

Then I got to thinking how nice cigarette cards would be as an oracle. It's unfortunate that there isn't a facsimile edition of these cards. You would think with all the Civil War buffs around there would be, but perhaps the company won't reproduce them for some reason.

Anyway, I bought the book--scant information on it, but I'm hoping the cards reproduced in the book are in colour to get full details--they may not be. They look good on the cover though.

Cigarette cards of any type or even a mixed collection of this type of card sound enchanting for an oracle, or to use with my favourite approach--clarifying cards.

I've always fancied a mixed deck of postcards or photographs too. Pomegranate sell bundles of photographs or postcards in random sets--great idea, but their shipping is enormous to Canada. I'm still thinking about this you can get bundles of 100 or 200 postcards. Imagine a big 4 1/4 x 6-inch oracle with 200 cards.
http://pomegranate.stores.yahoo.net/salesalesale.html

 

[room]

Some of these are really nice:

http://www.franklyncards.com/one/clo2.htm

http://www.franklyncards.com/one/clo1.htm

http://www.franklyncards.com/one/clo6.htm

The company Gallaher seems to do very nice sets, well to my taste anyway. Here is their page on this site. The guy says he'll cut the prices by 40%--they aren't bad when you see them that way. I am quite enthralled.
http://www.franklyncards.com/cat/cat5.htm

Lots of fabulously interesting stuff for using as oracles. Some of them are a bit like the Heritage playing cards or Knowledge Cards or the Natural World playing cards etc., but the illustrations are older.

 

[room]

I'm on another tangential twirl, but if I buy the set of 200 from Pomegranate, even with shipping it only works out to 25 cents per card CAD

I discovered these two years ago and I've buckled and bought the large 200 card collection.

I figure even if I don't like some of them I can use them for art references for drawing. Always nice to have photos for that. But they've got a lot of art postcards too--great for oracles. Deco stuff, Nouveau, famous photographers like Steichen and Steiglitz, many, many kinds of paintings.

 

[Gavriela]

Carreras put out a Lenormand deck by way of cigarette card - it's basically the same one as illustrated in the French Cartomancy deck.

Once in a while on ebay you see some cool collections of cigarette cards for sale, occasionally ones that were specifically meant to be oracles.

 

[Barbaras Ahajusts]

Maybe Doral?

Before we stopped smoking, I'm thinking it was Doral, had a collection going on. It started out with tobacco plants then went to flowers and such. I have a few. I really wanted the full set, but hubby told me it was stuiped.

Silly him, I like stuiped! ;o)

They are a small card, but they are nice.

Barb

 

[room]

I'm thinking it was Doral, had a collection going on. It started out with tobacco plants then went to flowers and such. I have a few.

I looked this up Barb and found a mention that Doral was the first company since the 1940s to issue cigarette cards, when they did so in the year 2000.
http://www.bizjournals.com/triad/stories/2003/04/07/story8.html

They are doing scenes of the States and Lighthouses now but I think these might be the ones you have--have a look at the attachment.


Also from the New York Public Library:


"...the Library's extensive, international collection of tobacco cards, which now numbers more than 125,000 individual items, including more than 3000 complete sets. While bibliophile George Arents (1875-1960) did not collect cigarette cards, he provided an endowment for the continued growth of his comprehensive collection on tobacco (whose processing and packaging had provided his fortune), which he had begun donating to NYPL in 1944. In addition to literature and artworks, the tobacco collection's scope has come to encompass a wide range of visual materials and printed ephemera associated with that commodity. The cigarette cards were acquired by curators in the 1960s and later."

I guess I just like cards of every type. Since the days when I used buy the Old Maid packs for children, I've loved playing cards. When I discovered oracles, it seemed a natural thing to incorporate other kinds of cards as oracles.

[p.s. some of these cigarette cards would go very nicely with the Victorian Flower Oracle or the Tree Magick deck.]

 

[Alta]

I volunteer in the War Museum and was going through and inventorying some really old files. I found a set of beautifully coloured very old cards put out by the Phillip Morris Tobacco Company showing British military uniforms over a couple of centuries. The quality of the engraving was very high, fine and very detailed. There were 48 of them. A real treasure, I enjoyed looking at them. Sorry I cannot share, the museum is understandably very strict and taking them home and scanning them in would be out of the question.

 

[Alta]

But I do have some I can share

These are part of a set of 25 cards put out by Glenfiddich showing the Scottish Clan Tartans. On the back of each card is a squib about the gentleman pictured and about the location etc of the clan.

 

[Barbaras Ahajusts]

Interesting links

Thanks for the links, Room & Marion! A lot of info to digest, and I like that!

The Doral cards you posted, Room was exactly them! I wished I had watched hubbys cigarettes closer so I could have kept them all!

Thank you!

Barb

 

[room]

These are part of a set of 25 cards put out by Glenfiddich showing the Scottish Clan Tartans.

Marion, are you secreting ephemera that can be used as oracles in your house???!!!

You know what I find interesting about these? Clans have such a history, you could use that as a clarifying card with great success. Maybe with a hard-hitting deck like the Thoth?

Is there a Scottish themed tarot deck that these could go with, I don't think so? The Celtic Wisdom deck has some Scottish people wearing tartan I think. Macbeth in the Shakespearian Tarot.

And the war museum story was great--there are real benefits to living in the capital with all that history.

[p.s. Barb--those cards are beautiful, I think they would be marvelous with the Victorian Flower Oracle or something else--The Flower Speaks maybe?]