Ogden's Cigarette Cards

Cigarette manufacturers in the mid 1800's used a piece of cardstock to provide rigidity to cigarette packaging to help keep the cigarettes from getting bent.  In 1875, the American tobacco company Allen and Ginter started printing pictures on these "cards" of actresses, baseball players, etc.  Soon other companies followed suit and before long cigarette trading cards were found in cigarette packages around the world.  Often these cards would be in numbered series of twenty-five or fifty, a clever marketing strategy to help build brand loyalty.  The cards went out of production during WWII when paper was scare and did not resume after the war ended.  Of course this makes some of them extremely valuable.  In 2007 a record of $2.8 million was set for the sale of a single card.

The collection below consists of twenty-five cards produced by Ogden's of Great Britain in 1929.  The subject is "Famous Dirt-Track Riders".  Similar to modern day baseball cards, the front has an image of the rider and the reverse has some background information and statistics.