Categorizing Cards

"To My Darling," a sho-card lettered postcard, gilded, embossed, and varnished, 1910s

Postcards, arcade cards, cigarette cards, gum cards, trade cards, and trading cards are loosely defined terms, but since they are found as illustration throughout Your Wate and Fate, a simple shuffle is in order:

• Arcade Cards: Images and/or text printed on a variety of weights of card stock which are made to be emitted from a machine of some sort. Most of the machines are coin-operated, but some are set to "free play." Not all arcade cards deal with fortune telling or character analysis, but the ones that do include methods such as astrology, numerology, palmistry, and cartomancy. Other arcade card topics include jokes, toasts, pin-ups, celebrities, musicians, and sports figures. Arcade cards vary greatly in size from tiny squares through thin rectangles, and up to postcard size. Those that are printed on postcard stock may or may not bear a printed postcard back, allowing them to be sent through the mails.

• Business Cards: Small cards, usually printed on medium-weight index stock, they bear the name of a businessperson and/or a company. They may also carry an address, telephone number, hours of operation, and a line or two of advertising. Most are single-sided, with the back left blank for writing a personal message if needed, but some are double-sided and may advertise specific products or a line of goods on the reverse.

• Cigarette Cards: Small, often fairly narrow, and typically colourful, these light-weight cards are given as random inclusions in packages of cigarettes. They generally come in sets of 12, 25, or 50 cards, and the sets cover a wide variety of topics, including ethnography, botany, zoology, geography, archaeology, divination, celebrities, and sports. In recent years, due to the health dangers of smoking, they have fallen out of favour and been replaced by trading cards.

• Fortune Paper Card Slips: These are fortune telling or character analysis texts, sometimes illustrated, which are printed on various weights of paper. They may be emitted from a machine, either flat or rolled in a tube; found in a package of candy; or arrive baked within a cookie.

• Gum Cards: Similar to cigarette cards, these are generally printed at a wider aspect ratio and on thicker card stock to fit a flat slab of chewing gum. They come in sets varying from 50 to more than 100 cards. Topics are the same as for cigarette cards. In recent years, due to the damage that decaying chewing gum does to the card stock, they have fallen out of favour and been replaced by trading cards.

• Postcards: Images and/or text printed on flexible card stock and suitable to be sent through the mails, postcards evolved out of private mailing cards, and by 1905 they had become an international craze. See more on identifying and dating them at this Mystic Tea Room page on Dating Tea Room Postcards.

• Sho-Cards: Point-of-sale advertising cards on stiff card stock featuring inventive hand-lettering. The sho-card style of lettering was also used in the design of postcards during the early 20th century. The name derives from "show card" -- a card that names a product and shows its price -- but it is never spelled any way other than "sho-card."

• Tea Cards: Similar to cigarette or gum cards, these are included in boxes of tea. Some companies have issued cards on topics such as botany, zoology, or geography, but others restrict themselves to the topic of growing, harvesting, packing, distributing, and serving tea.

• Trade Cards: Not to be confused with the similar-sounding trading cards, trade cards are a form of advertising card, generally larger than a business card,and very often bearing beautiful artwork which may or may not relate to the product or company being advertise. Their height of production was during the Victorian and Edwardian period, and most of them are reproduced by chromolithography.

• Trading Cards: As cigarette, gum, and tea cards were always subject to staining by the products with which they were packaged, collectors began to ask for cards that were sold simply as cards, not as sales incentives. Known as trading cards, these are released either in pre-boxed full-set form (usually 36 cards on a single topic per box), or in randomized packets of 10 cards, which are collected and traded to make up sets of 110 cards. Serious collectors buy cases, open the packets, and assemble complete sets for resale. Topics found on these cards are generally sports teams, but a sub-genre, known, rather awkwardly as non-sports trading cards, includes topics such as films, celebrities, political events, or news stories.

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Thank you.

catherine yronwode
curator, historian, and docent
Your Wate and Fate