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Posted By: ramram

Believe it or not, we can probably thank the civil war for our baseball card collecting mania. The obvious is that the civil war is what spread the National Game throughout the country but along with that was the collecting of cards. Daguerreotypes (produced on silver), ambrotypes (produced on glass) and then tintypes (produced on tin), in that order, were the method of photographers in the earliest years but this process was not cheap and did not allow for mass production (each image was unique). About half-way through the war they came up with a way to produce relatively cheap images on paper (carte de visites aka CDV's). Individual soldiers could then afford one or possibly a few copies of a CDV image of themselves to give to family and friends. Some photographers then started mass producing images of famous generals/officers and selling them to the general public. There are literally thousands of cdv's still out there of some of the most famous and can be picked up relatively cheap (however, confederates are harder to find and therefore more expensive because they ran short on photographic supplies and even paper so they didn't produce nearly as many). After the war, the photographers became resourceful, since they didn't have an endless supply of soldiers to take pictures of anymore, and began mass producing cdv cards of famous celebrities.

Rob M.