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 small sized 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". The listing there reads :
- 1 - American Editors (50). 1st series, numbered. A 2nd series was not issued.
If you look at the reverse of the card you will immediately see he is right, the cards all say "First Series", but 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. He also rates them quite highly, valuing them 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" equal. And of the large cards, this is the only set of the entire ten which is valued at 50 cents.
And you can see a card from that larger version as our Card of the Day for the 7th of October, 2025
His listing was used for our World Tobacco Issues Indexes, where it appears under Allen & Ginter`s Section 1, for "Issues in U.S.A.. Series issued before 1890.", which is when they founded the American Tobacco Company - and sub section 1.A. "Coloured Issues. 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".
Our set is again first up, and described as
- AMERICAN EDITORS. Nd. (50) ... A36-1
A. Small. Ref. USA/1
B. Large. Ref USA/35
And this text also appears in our updated version of the World Tobacco Issues Index, just with a new card code, of A400-010.
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 were issued. 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".
These 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 also says "First Series", yet had no second.
Now we also have a list of the editors, which you may think ought to be here, but it is actually housed with the large sized cards, as our Card of the Day for the 7th of October 2025. As to why, well this is because it also includes the name of the subject used for the additional scene - which only appears on those larger cards, and does not feature on these small sized versions