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Early Baseball Card Design
4 April 2007The design of the hobby’s pioneering sports cards can vary. Almost all entail some type of cardboard. This could be thin and brittle paperboard, thick pasteboard, delicate paper, paper mulches, or clothe. sizes range from as small as 1 3/4" x 2 3/4" to composite sheets measuring about 8 1/2" x 10". In between is everything from exhibits and strip cards, to cabinets and silks. Some of the sports cards from the 1800s were tintypes (images produced on thin pieces of tin). They were made with the then highly advanced pneumatic (air-powered) camera. A very sophisticated and expensive process, it’s easy to see why there aren’t many tintype cards today.
The earliest sports cards were made in two predominant ways; one consisting of a lithograph and the other a line drawing of the player. Each was hand made, one at a time, and pasted onto a thick or think piece of cardboard. Tinting is especially common on the sepia/white, and sepia/pink cards of the 1880s. Sepia toned cards quickly became the standard until replaced by lithography and eventually photography during the later part of the century.
The process of lithography was accidentally invented in the 1890s by Alois Senefelder. Simply, when an image retains ink, while the rest of the printing plate doesn’t, you got a lithograph. Generally, lithography was discovered when Senefelder realized that water and grease don’t mix well. The process greatly replaced the letterpress machines commonly found in newspaper houses of the day. At a time when illustrations and portraits of professional athletes (and most anyone else) had to be drawn by hand, printing sports cards with an offset rotary lithograph press quickly became a welcomed trait for card manufacturers.
The fronts of early baseball cards can be found with two variations - single player and team portrait. Also common were the team change cards, or cards with pictures of teams found on different cards. The only difference typically is the appearance of the team captain’s uniform.
Though there were not any traded sets (cards issued later in the season after players had been traded to other teams) during this time, some collectors believe the team change cards bear the inspiration for traded cards. And just as they are today, players were traded during early years. Minor changes were often made to their respective cards. Usually, the company made only simple corrections in these instances. More often than not, the card representing the traded player contained the photograph depicted on the regular card. Old Judge sets contain most of the cards with these changes.
Many team cards were used as trophies by player and team promoters. They were also given to team sponsors as a way to show appreciation for their financial support. Sponsors enjoyed being able to identify with the team they endorsed. This can be compared to the game programs you can get at a high-school football game, for example, which contain numerous pages of display advertisements of local businesses. Quite expensive to generate, the photographs on these cards were most often paid for by the player’s families. That’s a far cry from today’s hobby where sports card manufacturers pay the players millions of dollars for promotion rights!
Cabinet cards (or "cabinets") were introduced during the late 19th centruy and were quite popular. Somewhat larger than ordinary cards, they measure approximately 4 1/2" x 6 1/2". They were originally designed for use as family portraits. They commonly found a resting point on kitchen and living room tables, cabinets, or desks.
The term curio also derived from the abnormal size and thickness of the earliest cards. They get their name from the curio cabinets in which they were often placed. A curio cabinet was very common in households and is where any unusual or valuable article was placed. It can be compared to today’s bureaus and cupboards used to house small items of interest ("what-nots", for example).
Die-cut punch-outs are cards that were generally issued on sheets in an album. Preforated, they were punched from the sheet for use as decorative pieces around the house. Most were used to highlight the cover of a book or the pages of a photo album. Some were issued with an accompaning album for collecting. Subsequently, punch-outs are very difficult to dind without any glue stains on the card backs. Sizes are usually 2 1/2" by 3". Two of the most popular die-cut punch-out sets are the 1887 Tobacco Scraps and the 1896 N301 Mayo Cut cards.
The popularity of a particular sports card set or series, when issued, greatly depended upon the color, or colors it wielded. For example, the 1914 and 1915 Cracker Jack cards, with their deep and rich red backgrounds, are some of the most preferred sports cards ever produced. Today, they’re considered by most to be the dominant sets from the candy series. Because of their overwhelming acceptance when issued, these cards are fairly easier to find than most other candy sets.
On the other hand, most of the black and white sets - like the Texas Tommy (large and small) from the same year - are rather dull in appearance. They, in turn received little approval from collectors when issued. Thus, they’re much rarer than other early sports card issued from the day. This seems to be the pattern for most of the sets issued from 1886 to 1940.
Many early cards were printed with a serigraph in a silk-screen process. The silk-screen process involves a stencil used in printing a flat color design through a piece of silk or other fine cloth. The parts of the design not to be printed have been controlled through an impermeable film. A serigraph is a color print made by the silk-screen process and printed by the artist personally. Generally silk-screened cards are fuzzier than others.
As you can see there were a number of interesting ways to manufacture baseball (and trade) cards in the years surrounding 1900. You can also understand that collecting cards from that time can be a challenging hobby. There are a lot of dilemmas collectors today face. In particular, grasping which cards belong to which sets can be daunting. Distribution, card condition, and even numbering systems used (or not used) make collectors scratch their heads. In the next post, I’ll go over some of these collector issues.
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