In my most recent blog article I mentioned that I had done some traveling of late and wrote of the Bata Museum in Toronto. What I failed to mention is that our travels also took us briefly home to New York City – but that was an Ephemera-free visit.
I’m not a collector of such items but know that many of my Ephemera collector friends are.. and that there are several such collectors who belong to the new “Ephemera Network”.
If you have not as yet run across the NYPL collection I highly recommend it to you. The collection was made possible thanks to an endowment by a Mr. George Arents who was an heir to the American Tobacco Company. Mr. Arents (whose biography is a bit confusing because both he and his son dropped the Jr. and III after their names when the elder died, and them moved themselves up to Sr. and Jr.) was an avid collector of Tobacciana, which encompases all tobacco related items, not just tobacco cards.
If you have any interest in tobacco, or cigarette cards or related items, I highly recommend a visit to the NYPL Digital Collection… and from there to two blog articles on both Mr. Arents and the overall topic of Tobacciana. From those blogs you can reach out even further to what may well be a never ending set of links to related topics.
According to the NYPL link, “most cigarette cards were produced by conventional offset or other economical commercial printing processes, but a few series were issued as original gelatin silver photographs or printed on silk or linen fabric; others were created as puzzles or paper toy cut-outs.”
The appeal of contemporary cigarette cards fell by the 1950s, ceasing their production and distribution… and from there began yet another Ephemera collectible… “Cigarette Cards”
Enjoy!
I’m Tom Murphy and thanks for helping me give Ephemera the encore it deserves.
Tom
Click to see my current eBay items
Technorati tags: eBay, Encore Ephemera, Cigarette Cards, George Arents, New York Public Library, Tobacciana, Ephemera, The Ephemera Network, Delcampe Auctions
About Tom Murphy
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