“Hidden Beauties” and
Other Microscopical Trade Cards
John Gustav Delly, Hooke College of Applied Sciences
Introduction
Everybody is familiar with, or at least aware of, modern
trading cards. A trading card is a small card made
out of thick paper or paperboard
that contains the image of a person, place, thing, or event, with a short
description on the reverse side. Today’s trading cards traditionally depict
sports figures, with baseball
cards being especially well known. In 2007, a
single trading card bearing the likeness of Honus Wagner, a
turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S. baseball player, was sold for $2,350,000, and later that same
year, it was sold again for a record $2,800,000! The reason for the card’s
rarity is that it was to be issued by America’s biggest tobacco
corporation, and Wagner was a non-smoker who objected to the issuing of the
card. Legal action followed that prevented release of the card, but somehow
four cards are said to have slipped out—it was one of these that was auctioned for such a large sum.
Trading cards actually have, as their ancestor, trade cards.
The earliest form of trade cards, which preceded business cards, are found at
the beginning of the seventeenth century in London. They were used as
advertising, or maps, directing the public to merchants’ stores, there being no
well-developed newspapers or street numbering system at the time. These trade
cards were printed in monotone until the introduction of color lithography
around 1830. Eventually, these trade cards were inserted in the product itself,
with some of the earliest examples inserted into paper packs of cigarettes to
act as stiffeners to protect the product. Allan and Ginter in the U.S. in 1886,
and W.D. & H.O. Wills in Britain in 1888 were the first tobacco companies
to insert color lithographed cards in their cigarette packages. Once the cards
started to depict sports figures, animals, inventions, transport, cars and
motor racing, war and military, etc., the collecting of these trade cards
became so popular that by 1900 there were thousands of tobacco card sets
manufactured by over 300 companies. Following the success of cigarette cards,
manufacturers of other products started including trade cards inside their
products, such as candy, tea, biscuits/cookies, cocoa, chewing gum, coffee, etc.
Microscopical Trade Cards
It should not be surprising that eventually, after series of
cards from two to 25 or 50, or even 100 related subjects depicting famous
actresses, sports figures, heraldry, city views, military heroes, inventions,
etc. etc. were issued, there would be a series issued depicting microscopic
plants and animals. In fact, scores of series of microscopical trade cards have
been issued over many decades, and it is proposed here to describe a selection
of these.
“Hidden Beauties” (1929)
One of the most beautiful of the microscopical series of
trade cards was one called “Hidden Beauties,” issued by John Player & Sons.
In 1877, John Player bought a small tobacco factory that William Wright had
started in 1828. Player’s innovation was to offer pre-packaged tobacco, prior
to which smokers bought tobacco by weight from loose supplies, and cigarette
papers to roll it in. Player was one of the first to include trade cards in
the cigarette packs as a stiffener, and the first set of cards, produced in
1893, was “Castles and Abbeys”; other
well-known sets included “Footballers”
(1926), “Civil Aircraft” (1935), and “Motor Cars” (1936). More than 200
different sets of their trade cards were reprinted in the 1990s.
