Here we have "orange", as represented by the Orange Tip Butterfly, transformed into a flighty young flapper girl. Now orange is the colour on the spectrum, and in the rainbow, that falls directly between red and yellow, the yellower tones serving to dilute the darkness of the red. And this is the way that painters make it too.
The odd thing is that the colour, first called orange in 1512, is actually named after the fruit - which was first named by the Tamils as naram. The Tamils gave this word to Sanskrit, which altered it slightly and made it naranja - though they thought it referred to the tree and not the fruit - and this spread throughout Asia and Europe to France, who gave it to us in the Middle Ages as pomme d`orenge or pomme narenje, almost certainly orally because though naranje and orenge look dissimilar, they pretty close in spoken word.
As far as our card, this first appears in our original John Player reference book (RB.17, issued in 1950), but with a different title to the one usually given it, namely :
38. 50. BUTTERFLY GIRLS. Butterflies with girls` bodies. Small cards. Fronts in colours. Backs in black. Overseas issue, about 1926.
A. Player`s "Drumhead" packet on back, no descriptive text.
B. Backs with descriptive text, anonymous issue.Similar series issued with "Cigarillos Club" (Spanish language backs); medium size issues were also made by B.A.T. with "Albert" Cigarettes and with anonymous backs.
As this is a Card of the Day, it therefore becomes the home page for this set and its variations. These are described within the British American Tobacco reference book, RB.21, issued in 1952, as :
217-38. BUTTERFLIES (Girls). Note revised series title. This series was issued as follows :
I - Small cards.
A. Player Overseas issue. Titled "Butterflies"
B. Anonymous issue, with letterpress on back. Titled "Butterflies"
C. Club issue. Titled "Mariposa". Back on cream yellow board, inscribed in red in Spanish : "Mariposas (Serie de 50). No. ... Cigarillos "Club", Con boquillas de oro y corcho."II - Medium cards.
D. Anonymous issue, with letterpress on back. Titled "Butterflies"
E. Albert Issue. No series title. Back inscribed in red "Cigarettes Albert"Printings A-D are numbered; E is unnumbered. A list of captions from fronts in the order of the numbered printings is given below; Latin names only are quoted, although some cards bear captions in English in addition, and card No.14 has caption in English only.
There is a list which follows, but this was way too complex to retype, so it is attached as a scan...
As far as where these cards were issued, A was in Malaya and Siam. B in Malta, C in South America, and by British American Tobacco, D we do not know yet, and E was in Belgium and the Belgian Congo. All this information is extracted from the front of the British American Tobacco reference book.
This seems an opportune moment to show you our card the medium anonymous format, to compare how it differs.
The first thing you will notice is that the image on our card is not just reduced in size, as you might imagine. Instead only the middle portion of the medium sized card is used, the top and the bottom portions being removed. This means that the title on the medium card has had to be relocated, and split, to either side of her dancing feet.
We will start to do a bit more of this as we progress through the indexing.
Also we include the reverse in this picture, simply because it tells of the butterfly depicted, which is something sadly missing from our version.
Now in our World Tobacco Issues Indexes our set is described under the Export issues of the Player listings, where we find out that it was issued, "Chiefly in New Zealand, Malaya and Siam". It is catalogued. in both the original volume and the updated one, as :
BUTTERFLIES. Sm. Girls with butterflies` wings. Nd. (50). See RB.21/217-38.A