Bonus Fact of the Week, No. 1
January 21st, 2012 by slangon
I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but for the last few months I’ve taken to taking the day off from blogging on Saturdays. It’s not a big deal. It’s just a habit that I’ve fallen into and grown sort of comfortable with. Recently, however, 2 things have entered my little world that have made me rethink how I can use this day of blogging rest.
First off, I recently discovered an email newsletter that I signed up for that is pretty awesome. Normally I’m not the type of person to go around signing up for email newsletters, but this one is really interesting and has reduced the boringness of my daily commute greatly. It’s called Now I Know and it’s run by a feller named Dan Lewis. Basically, every weekday you get an email containing a article about some random subject. The articles are relatively short, being able to be read in about 5 minutes, but they’re also pretty in depth. The subjects he chooses are also right up my alley. They’re usually some bizarre or kind of macabre subject, or if they’re not he’ll put a weird spin on them. After the fact, I also found out that Dan Lewis is a big Mets fan, which made him that much cooler in my book. Anyway, if you like inane trivia, you should think about signing up for that newsletter.
The second, and probably more important thing that inspired me to do something with these lost Saturdays is I won a big old lot of old British cigarette cards on the old eBay.
There’s 74 cards in that rather unruly pile. I won them in 2 lots, both of which ran $6 with free shipping. That’s a little over $0.16 per card. All 74 cards are from the W.D. & H.O. Wills Tobacco Company of Bristol. The company was started by Henry Overton Wills in 1786 and by the time the 20th century rolled around, they were one of the leading manufacturers of tobacco based products in the world. In response to James Duke’s formation of the American Tobacco Company, which was basically a monopoly of American tobacco firms, Wills joined John Player, Lambert & Butler, William Clarke & Son, Franklyn Davey, Edwards Ringer, J&F Bell, F&J Smith and a couple of other British cigarette companies to form Imperial Tobacco in 1901. As if those 2 monopolies weren’t bad enough, a year after forming, the British monopoly joined with the American monopoly to form the British-American Tobacco Company Ltd. which is still around today. As a matter of fact, it is the second largest tobacco company in the world behind Phillip Morris. Anyway, the same way American tobacco companies used cards to sell their wares, the Brits inserted little pieces of printed cardboard in their product to help attract customer. Whereas in the States that practice stopped in the early teens or so, the English companies continued to put cards in packs of smokes.
The 2 lots that I won were both from series’ called “Do You Know”, which Wills released in 4 different series of 50 cards each between 1922 and 1933. The first lot I got was from the initial series which was released in September of 1922 and the next lot was from Series 2, which was released in May of 1924. If you’re wondering, Series 3 came out in February, 1926 and the final series dropped in July of 1933. As you can tell from the title, each of these cards has an explanation for something that apparently every British smoker of the 20’s was dying to know. I actually had a surprising amount of trouble trying to find any blogs or sites that had info on these cards or even British cigarette cards in general. There were plenty of sites selling the cards, but very little information. All the info I just spouted came from a pretty cool book I picked up used with some Christmas Barnes & Noble gift cards called The Complete Catalogue of British Cigarette Cards put out by The London Cigarette Card Company. It has a brief history of British Cigarette cards (maybe 5-6 pages), lots of pictures and a listing of sets (number of cards, date of issue, size of cards, what company put it out, etc.).
Anyway, between reading Dan’s Now I Know newsletter and getting my mitts on all these Do You Know cards and having all these empty Saturdays, I figured I would just show 1 card every Saturday, just to teach all you whippersnappers a thing or 2 that everyone should know. You know, things like why a Scotsman wears a Sporran or what yeast is. Enjoy.
1922 W.D. & H.O. Wills Do You Know, A Series of 50 #1
Yes. Thanks for sharing.
This post had a deja vu feel too it, as I too recently won a random lot of mostly British tobacco cards, most of which were Wills’s Cigarette cards. Great buy and I’m looking forward to them greeting me every Saturday morning.
A1 at Lloyd’s sir!