And now on to the cards of our basketball collector, starting with one of the most sought after basketball cards of them all, for many reasons, but primarily because it was one of the first four cards to ever show a team, playing the sport. That team is from Williams College in Massachusetts, which was created as a college for men only in 1793, through a bequest from the estate of Ephraim Williams, of that state, who was killed at war in 1755.
It is also the only basketball card in this first subset of twenty-five cards, the three others coming from later ones, Northwestern in the second group, Luther in the fifth and Xavier in the sixth. The final two also only show a single player, and not a match in progress.
Actually North Western is a more interesting card, for it shows six men from two teams, one having an orange strip and one a dark one, and there is also an official holding the ball. Looking at the flag, which is dark mauve, we can safely say that these darker clothes are the same colour. It is suspected that the other team is from Syracuse, who have taken the gender-friendly step of becoming Syracuse Orange, and we know that the two met only twice in the years that this card was issued, on the 13th of February 1909, and on the 23rd of February 1910, and that Williams lost, both these times.
As far as the card chat, the first thing to note is that "Murad", the only name shown on this card, is not the issuer, though if you look up "Murad" in our original and updated World Tobacco Issues Indexes you will find a note to check under American Tobacco Co. - Group Issues. The cataloguing there is for the entire set of 150 cards, and it reads :
COLLEGE SERIES. Md. 68 x 52. Bkld. (150). Inscribed "S. Anargyros" and "Murad". Ref USA/T.51
1. "College Series 1-25" (A) unnumbered (B) numbered on front (C) inscribed "Second Edition"
2. "College Series 26-50" (A) unnumbered (B) inscribed "Second Edition"
3. "College Series 51-75"
4. "College Series 76-100"
5. "College Series 101-125"
6. "College Series 126--150"
Now that T.51 reference is the American Card Catalogue by Jefferson Burdick, and he lists these cards as :
T.51. College Series. (150) Murad.
Six series of 25 each. First two series in a Second Edition, with minor changes. A few unfinished errors without printing known.
He values them at just 0.5 cents each. This is very different from their value today.
By the way most of those "unfinished errors" seem to be missing colours, and it is most noticeable on the pennant, which is a different colour to the norm, owing to one of the colours in the run being missing. What happened was that each large piece of card, with several cards on, had to run through the printing press more than once, and each time it did, a different colour was laid on top of the cards, making, eventually, a fully coloured card. However if there was a fault, the ink ran out, or was not liquid enough, the incomplete sheets would have gone on a pile to be discarded, and these were then sometimes removed, and later would find their way into circulation, where they would be snapped up as rarities, when really they were never intended to be seen.
In actual fact "Murad" branded cigarettes were hand rolled, and made of pure Turkish Tobacco. And they have quite a tale to tell, because "S. Anargyros" is not a brand, it is a person, a Greek, born in Spetses in 1849. He moved about, a lot, and from a very young age, all across the Mediterranean, to Turkey, where he first encountered Turkish cigarettes, and then into Europe, ending this leg of his journey in England, where he again met up with tobacco products. From there, he emigrated to New York, and found a job, in tobacco. He also found friendship, and perhaps a surrogate father, in the big boss of the works, and when this man died, our man found out he had been left the entire company. From there he built it up to become a huge enterprise, larger than anyone had ever thought possible. Then he fell in love, with his second cousin, who tries hard, but does not like America, or maybe misses her homeland, Greece. And so he sells up and goes back with her. Not only that, he prospers, pouring his money into the area, building a hotel, and returning a desolated forest to its former glory, and lastly, creating a school that is still educationally prominent across the world to this day.