At what point...

[mintacular]

did the worth of the cardboard baseball card actually trump the value of the actual product being sold (gum, cigarette, candy, etc.)? Thank you

[Volod]

You mean from the point of view of the consumer, or from the perspective of what - an investor? As a kid ripping open waxpacks in the 1950's, I never even bothered with the gum. It was the cards that I and every other schoolyard twerp wanted. However, as I understand it, around the turn of the last century, the cards were regarded as minor inducements to buy the main product, which was in most cases, tobacco. It seems likely that the relative value to the consumer flipped not long after gum or cheap candy replaced tobacco.

[ALR-bishop]

The book The Card by OKeefe and Thompson ( which is mainly about the background of the PSA 8 Wagner cards)has some historical narrative about hobby in general and the use of cards to promote tobacco and confectionary products.

I mentioned in another thread that post war,Topps never had a monopoly or exclusive contracts with players to sell their baseball cards. To avoid anti trust issues their contracts only specified that they had the exclusive right to market the players' likeness with gum/candy/confections. Otherswere free to market cards by themselves or with cookies ( Fleer 63) or marbles (Leaf 61), but Topps at the time seems to have established "the market" as cards and gum.

I agree with Volod that when buying packs as a kid in the late 50s I did not care much about the gum, except for that wonderful and exotic smell when you opened the packs

[bn2cardz]

http://www.oldcardboard.com/t/t206/I...al-edition.pdf

In the above article by Scot Reader it indicates that for young boys it was happening as early as 1909. On page 15-16 of the above PDF it references an article in a 1909 article “The Small Boy’s Mania" in which it talks about young boys buying packs of cigarettes to obtain the cards then the would peddle the cigarettes.

The entire PDF was an interesting read, but the article was very interesting when I ran across it a while back.

[doug.goodman]

My earliest memories of buying packs of Topps cards involves a stack of cards and a stack of gum, then sorting the cards while ignoring the gum.

Doug

[ALR-bishop]

Doug ---you didn't even check to see if any of the gum pieces might have had the image of a famous person on them ?

[Volod]

Hmmn, I wonder if I could have walked into a cigar store as an eight-year-old in 1953, plunked down a couple bucks on the counter and bought a pouch of Redman to get the attached cards. Imagine the proprietor wouldn't even have thought twice about making the sale. Ma would really have freaked seeing me spit a big wad, I'll bet.

[Bob Lemke]

Steve . . .

Red Man wasn't in a pouch in the early 1950s, it was a cardboard box. The card was attached by a waxy paper outer wrapper.