This card is a rather tenuous link to "Mail", but it is a great card. This shows Jonas Mills Bundy, the editor of the New York Express and Mail, and he died in September 1891, aged just fifty-six
The newspaper was the result of a merger, in 1881, between the New York Weekly Mail, that had started in 1873, and the New York Weekly Express, which started in the 1840s and was an enormously busy enterprise which maybe just ran out of steam or money, for it began as a daily paper with a Saturday special, moving to weekly on Fridays in 1843, but also issuing a weekly express on Wednesdays. Sadly, the combined "Weekly Mail and Express" was rather short lived, or perhaps the title was simply altered to just "The Mail and Express" once everyone realised it was weekly. The last edition was in 1904.
This set has the honour of being catalogued by Jefferson Burdick as USA/1, albeit purely through alphabetical order for USA/2 is "American Indian Chiefs". It appears in our World Tobacco Issues Indexes under Allen & Ginter Section 1, "Issues in U.S.A.", and sub section 1.A. "Coloured Issues", which is summarised as "Small size approximately 70 x 38, large 83 x 72 m/m. The large size shows the corresponding small card design with other matter added". (And you can see the front of that thanks to Google/J.M. Bundy)
Our set is first up, and described as
AMERICAN EDITORS. Nd. (50)
A. Small. Ref. USA/1
B. Large. Ref USA/35
If you look at the reverse of the card you will immediately see "First Series", and wonder of why I have not mentioned it. The truth is that there never was a Second Series, and yet one must have been planned, in order to have taken the time and effort to add that to the first fifty cards. It is strange too because you often find sets that do not say a first series, but then have a second following.
Jefferson Burdick`s American Card Catalogue comes straight out with it, by adding a line to say "A 2nd Series was not issued". He also rates them quite highly, at 50 cents a card, for out of the thirty four Allen and Ginter sets he lists none are more expensive than ours, and only "Fruits", "Great Generals", and "World`s Sovereigns" are equal. And of the large cards, this is the only set of the entire ten which is valued at 50 cents.
Now before I race on do note that this set was also produced as a printed album, the earliest such album to be produced, in 1887, the same year as the cards. This initially led me to wonder if these cards were issued first of all the Allen & Ginter issues, but they were not; that honour goes to the 1885 "Photographic Cards", of which there are hundreds, covering all subjects, and including a sub set of sixty-six "Girl Cyclists".
The printed albums were exchanged for coupons, and the one which is based on our set is catalogued as being 231 x 153 m/m and ten pages plus covers. And curiously, it too says "First Series", yet had no second.