Cigarette Cards and Pipe-Themed Series

Cigarette cards are palm-sized cardboard cards that came out of cigarette packs. They began appearing in the 1880s and stopped being produced with the Second World War. The card's original function was to support the packaging: since cigarettes were sold in thin paper packs, a stiff piece of cardboard inserted inside prevented the cigarettes from being crushed. Once a picture was printed on one side of the blank cardboard and a few lines of description on the back, the result was an object that could be collected as numbered series. A small portion of these series took the pipe and pipe types as their subject; none of the tobacco companies that printed the cards manufactured pipes.

Series Devoted to the Pipe

Set	Company	Year	Number of cards
World's Smokers	Allen & Ginter, Richmond	1888	50
Votaries of the Weed	Gallaher Ltd.	1916	50
From Plantation to Smoker	John Player & Sons	1926	25
Pipes of the World	W.A. & A.C. Churchman	1927	25

Allen & Ginter's 1888 series "World's Smokers" is catalogued under the code N33. Each of the fifty cards is devoted to a smoker from a different country, depicted in local dress; copies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are 7 × 3.8 cm colored lithographs. Ipswich-based W.A. & A.C. Churchman's "Pipes of the World" set, meanwhile, is one of the few series devoted directly to pipe types; placing meerschaum, clay, and briar examples side by side, these cards are considered a visual record reflecting the era's prevailing views for the world history of the pipe. John Player & Sons' "From Plantation to Smoker" series shows tobacco's path from field to smoker step by step. Records indicate that A. Frankau, the firm behind the BBB brand, also published a twenty-five-card series titled "Pipe History" in 1926.

The Kyd-Signed "Votaries of the Weed"

The images on Gallaher Ltd.'s fifty-card series from 1916 belong to English illustrator Joseph Clayton Clark (1857-1937), who signed under the pseudonym Kyd. Clark's principal fame comes from his illustrations of Charles Dickens characters; he drew his smoker portraits with the same caricature language, in exaggerated expressions and poses. The set's title requires some explanation today: in English, a "votary" is someone devoted to a person or a belief; "weed" is an old, frequently encountered 19th-century name for tobacco. Together they mean roughly "devotees of the weed."

Rise in Britain, and Two Interruptions

The habit of giving out cards was born in the United States. Richmond, Virginia-based Allen & Ginter is counted among the first firms to distribute cards, starting in 1879; makers such as Goodwin & Co. soon followed suit. The method crossed to Britain in the late 1880s, and it was there that the real mass production took place: W.D. & H.O. Wills, John Player & Sons, Ogden's, and dozens of competitors published numbered series, most of 25 or 50 cards. Production stopped in 1917 due to the raw-material shortage brought on by the First World War, resumed in 1922, was banned again in 1940 for wartime economic reasons, and never returned to its former scale.

Cartophily and the Great Collections

In English, card collecting is called cartophily; The Cartophilic Society of Great Britain, still the field's active institution, catalogs tobacco prints worldwide. The most comprehensive collection on record belongs to Edward Wharton-Tigar (1913-1995); according to records, roughly 45,000 sets, totaling around a million cards. Following his death, the collection passed to the British Museum and was entered into the Guinness records as the largest of its kind. Though production ended long ago, the cards themselves have not disappeared: within pipe collecting, a distinct branch pursues not the pipe itself but the printed material produced around it, including these cards.