From “Beauties,” a cigarette card from American Tobacco Co. All images: George Arents Collection, New York Public Library.
A set of beauties protruding from flower heads helped hawk packs of cigarettes.
Dimly we remember little coupons inside packets of Raleigh and Old Gold cigarettes, but by the time we took up this fiendish habit in the late 1960s, nobody much smoked Old Golds. (What did those coupons get you, anyway?) “Premiums” were for kids, inside boxes of Cracker Jacks. And we were big grown ups, inhaling images of the Marlboro Man.
It wouldn’t be too long before we didn’t need cowboys at sundown either. We were hooked, no sales pitches, Green Stamps, or lassos required.
So how surprising (and creepy) to have come upon a whole collection of delicate floral “cigarette cards” and reference to the collecting-bug for them: cartophily. “The cigarette card sprang into existence in the mid to late nineteenth century, and was originally nothing more than a blank card inserted as a stiffener for a paper pack of cigarettes. By the 1880s, American and British companies started putting pictures of products on one side of a card,” not just products but birds, movie stars, and flowers. The tobacco companies printed cards in series of 25-50, to entice smokers (as if they needed to) to keep on buying and “complete the set.”
We came upon this flower series, issued by the American Tobacco Company of Durham, NC, in the collection of the New York Public Library. NYPL holds “more than 125,000 individual items, including more than 3000 complete sets” of cigarette cards. Quite a puffin’ archive! We find especially incongruous the pairing of female “beauties” and flower blossoms with cigarette-smoking, though watercolors of cancerous lips and black lungs might not have gone over quite as well.
Regrettably we don’t know the names of the artist(s) who made these works of commercial art-ephemera. Nor do we have dates. One source notes that cigarette cards “lasted until about 1965,” about the time we started collecting these, packaged not with cigs but bubble gum.
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