The original intention of the Cartophilic Society was not just to collect cards and hide them away for private pleasure, but, instead, to record them, and research them, and share what was known with other collectors in order that they could add any different cards they had discovered to the ever growing lists.
When Colonel Charles Lane Bagnall D.S.O. M.C. T.D. F.P.R.S.I. laid the foundation stone of Cartophily in the 1920’s, he had to start from scratch. You see, though cards had been issued since the 1870s, almost no information about them had ever been written down.
As for asking the issuers, well, that was met with complete surprise, for they believed that cards were ephemeral, and their entire purpose was to sell more product by encouraging the basic human instinct to form a complete set - and simply to be replaced with something new when sales started to dry up.
As for the origins of cigarette cards, nothing could be less glamorous; someone realised that if you sell a commodity in a paper packet, which risks getting damaged, adding a stiff layer between paper and content lessens the risk, or prevents it entirely.
The important thing for us, though, was supplied by someone else - considered to have been Edward Bok - and that was the realisation that if you printed a picture on that cardboard, with a company name, it provided extra advertising. This developed into listing the cards in that set on the cards, then to numbering each card, and finally to adding the words “A SERIES OF…” plus the number, so collectors knew there were other cards, still out there, yet to find.
