It’s sort of apropos that I’m writing about it on 1/11/11, too.

This one came from eBay, very much on a whim. Part of my job is doing image research for whatever design project we happen to be working on at my company. One of the lines of research that I was working on last week happened to bring me across some images of old tobacco cards, among which was some old Wills’s Cigarette cards. Of you don’t know, Wills’s was a British tobacco company that was one of the most prolific producers of tobacco cards across the pond. They were pretty much the English version of Allen & Ginter (the cigarette company, not the revival trading card set).

Like Allen & Ginter, they produced a lot of sets with non-sport subjects, although I would think they probably leaned more towards tennis, golf and cricket when it came to sports subjects. I was actually a little thrown off by the difficulty I had trying to find information on Wills’s cards. I found info about the cigarette company, along with plenty of sites that were selling the cards, but not a whole lot of sites that had information about the cards themselves. I’m kind of used to being able to find details about different sets when it comes to American trading cards. I guess the British blogging community has a bit of catching up to do, eh.

Anyway, so I was looking at all these images of British tobacco cards for work and took a look on eBay, just out of curiosity. I ended up seeing this beauty for $0.99 with no bid and less than a day to go, so I threw up a dollar bid and hoped for the best.

The seller was only asking $0.63 for shipping, which made me a little leery. I was expecting to get the card in just a plain white envelope, which is indeed what happened. Luckily, they sandwiched it pretty well between 2 pieces of cardboard so it got to me a-okay. I guess you really can’t beat a 101 year old card for $1.62.

Tags: 1910 Wills's Cigarettes Aviation Series, non-sport, tobacco cards, zeppelin
Filed Under: It Came from the 'Bay by slangon
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