Card of the Day - 2022-01-16

Here is Gar Wood, the World`s Speed Boat Champion.

There are two very interesting webpages about Gar Wood and his boats – one is a sensible website, that of the Antique Boat Museum of Clayton New York whilst the other is more my kind of website, and goes into other details including what happened to his house. That`s a site called jobbiecrew, but it does contain adult themes on other pages.

The O/57 code comes from our original Ogdens reference book RB.15, which was published in 1949. Curiously the full title of this book is "The Cigarette Card Issues of Ogdens Ltd. Part I. All issues excluding "Guinea Gold" series” and the reason for this was that those Guinea Gold cards were to form a “Part 2”, which is actually listed amongst the “Proposed 1949 Programme” from the back of RB.11 (Wills Part II), and moves to “In Preparation” on the back cover of RB.14 (Wills Part III). However after that it discreetly disappears. It was finally published as RB24 in 1959, and was reprinted in 1978, as a hardback, combined with the Ogdens Part 1. These were both superseded in 2015 by our very grand and informative book on Ogdens and Guinea Gold, which you can buy from our bookshop.

In fact, after having done a bit more research, according to a long list in the inside back cover of RB.9, our guide to Lambert and Butler, issued in 1948, the Ogdens “book” was actually planned to be a trio, with the standard Ogden cards as book one, the "Guinea Gold" as book two, and the "Tabs" as book three. The first part, just the Ogden issues, was earmarked to be published during 1948, along with Phillips, Taddy, and Wills Part II. Taddy and Wills were, but Ogden did not appear until 1949, and when it was it also included the Tabs issues, because they were “so closely interlocked with other issues that segregation was found impracticable in a work which includes Ogden`s overseas issues” - many of which referred to “Tab” in their title.

In the 1950 London Cigarette Card Company catalogue this set was listed at 2d a card and 10/- a set. This set was also issued by Hignett (H536-430) and in that same catalogue it gives a sale price for this version of 6d. a card and 30/- a set. Intriguingly, whilst the Ogdens version only has a year, the Hignett gives a month of issue, namely June 1937.