Card of the Day - 2023-06-09

Our last beetle of the week has travelled far to be here and was part of a long running series. They are kind of "missing link" cards, because they were not issued with tobacco, which rules out them being recorded in the World Tobacco Issues Index and they were issued in Australia, so are not in the British Trade Index. However there is a magical pair of volumes called the Australian and New Zealand Indexes, which record all issues of the Antipodes, whether they be trade or tobacco. Volume one is out of print and hard to find, though I got mine fairly cheaply on eBay, but volume two is still on sale from our bookshop. 

The listing for this card is in Volume one (RB.30 - published in 1983) and provided the important information that the cards were issued by the Service Stations, so rather than buying something and finding the card inside you would be given it at the till. The header tells us that they were issued in Australia, and that these were inscribed "Shell" without the full name. In other words it is just either the shell shaped logo with "Shell" nestling within, or simply the word "Shell". 

The beetles set was part of a bigger issue that ran from 1959 until 1965, nine sets in all, and five hundred and forty cards. 

There was a bit of a mix up though, and one of the sets, possibly two, were wrongly numbered. "Citizenship" carries the numbers 1-60, which had already been used by "Discover Australia with Shell", and "Meteorology" is recorded as being numbered from 261 - 420 which is obviously wrong as it was a set of sixty only, and also some of those numbers are also used by another set, "Transportation".