Have you thought about investing in trading cards?
If you haven’t, maybe you should.
Here’s the first thing you may not know about this inconsequential, essentially disposable kids diversions:
The most valuable ever - a legendary Mickey Mantle Topps 1952 baseball card - sold for $12.6 million.
Mickey Mantle in 1953, a great player, with a legacy in America's Pastime, and perhaps an even bigger one in one of the world's favourite hobbies.
Wow.
With that as a starting point here are seven things you didn’t know about trading cards:
1 - They originally had a practical purpose
An early advert for Allen & Ginter showing off their cards.
The first trading cards were stiffeners.
If you’ve ever smoked you’ll know that cigarettes are fragile, and there’s nothing more infuriating to their (addicted let’s not forget) owner than having them break up in a pocket.
Small, stiff card inserts helped keep your cigarettes safe. And if you know anything about capitalism you’ll know you have to make use of every inch of space.
Sometimes these cards were used as advertising space, and some were used as a sales aid by producing sets of things for buyers to collect.
Today, we’d call it marketing by gamification.
2 - Baseball cards may have a separate historical strand
The first baseball cards may have been adverts for baseball stores and manufacturers or for the teams themselves. That makes them technically trade cards rather than trading cards, but no-doubt people did collect them.
The Brooklyn Atlantics didn't survive far into the professional era of baseball, but this may be the oldest surviving baseball card, of which there are two known copies. Image courtesy Heritage Auctions.
Professional baseball dates back to the mid-19th century. The first professional baseball organisation was the National Association of Base Ball Players founded in 1856.
Leagues soon started to evolve (as did a ban on black players), and were formalised and national by the 1860s and 70s.
There is one known pre-Civil War card, featuring the Brooklyn Atlantics team and probably dating to 1860.
It was sold for $179,250 in 2015.
3 - The birth of the hobby is intimately tied to cigarette smoking
There is no agreed first trading card, but Allen & Ginter, a tobacco company from Richmond, Virginia in the US is a very likely possibility.
They started out adding ads to their packing cards, and then probably in 1886 they started to produce collectible series on a huge variety of topics.
Although the cards were a giveaway, it's clear that this is a high-quality image.
Although women did smoke, the habit was considered a manly vice and the early cards focused on subjects that were thought to be of interest to men: sport, war, the great outdoors.
The cards became very successful and a big selling point for your brand of cigarettes. There was tough competition to produce interesting, well-chosen and well-produced cards.
History writer, Ben Johnson says: “They eventually evolved however, into miniature reference books with fine illustrations and detailed texts that captured snapshots of the social history of the day.”
4 - War made them more general
World War I was a Total War, and whole economies were enlisted into the fight on all sides.
Italian soldiers lighting up. Cigarettes were a mainstay of the boring, terrifying life of soldiers enduring trench warfare.
Paper was rationed. And cigarette cards were a casualty of shortages.
Although cigarettes were a big part of the war - they were included in rations for some armies - this marked a shift in card collecting.
After the war, the hobby began to be more closely associated with sweets, particularly bubble gum.
5 - A legendary card from 1909 has inspired a book and a movie adaptation
T-206 Honus Wagner card, perhaps the most famous baseball card ever made.
If T-206 Honus Wagner means nothing to you then you’re not a card trader.
This card is legendary.
Honus Wagner was a great player for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Naturally, he was included in the 1909 to 1911 T206 issue from the American Tobacco Company.
But he didn’t want to be in there. Removing his permission to reproduce his image (the reason why is unclear) created a rarity.
As few as 200 of the cards were produced.
In 1997 Dan Gutman’s children’s novel featuring the card, Honus 7 Me, was published. It was filmed in 2004 as The Winning Season, starring Matthew Modine and Kristin Davis. A 2008 novel, Swindle, by Gordon Korman, also deployed the card as its central MacGuffin. It was filmed in 2013 for Nickelodeon.
6 - Baseball is king, but every subject and sport has been carded
Sports cards have come to dominate the collecting hobby, and baseball is the best-known and most developed sports collecting scene.
But trading cards are a huge area, and if you want to start collecting them now there’s really no limit to the specialist lines you could follow.
Star Wars is reliably collectible, this Luke Skywalker card made $78,000 at auction. You can see it is "slabbed" for protection and graded as Gem Mint and 10, highly desirable figures.
Cards for association football, Australian rules football, baseball, basketball, boxing, cricket, golf, NFL football, ice hockey, horse racing, motor racing, rugby (union and league), lacrosse, netball, skate boarding, surfing, sumo… and more have all been put on trading cards.
The first British cigarette cards, from Wills, were a patriotic set showing soldiers and ships; then monarchs.
More recently, comic books, movies, and popular culture more generally have produced extensive collectible scenes. I have a small set of Beatles cards (though they’re not valuable).
A major sale of non-sports cards due to start next month shows a good mix of movies (Star Wars), gaming (Mortal Kombat), entertainment (WWF wrestling), and super heroes (Marvel comics) at the top of the value charts.
They can be very valuable too. A complete sets of Three Stooges cards sold for $41,250 in 2023. A boxed set of Star Trek cards made $58,750 last year. A single Batman card realised $45,000 in July 2024.
In the 21st century Pokemon trading cards have become a global phenomenon and a branch of the hobby in their own right. The most valuable Pokemon card sold for $5.27 million in 2024.
7 - The hobby has lots of formal rules
Card collecting, particularly in America, is every bit as formalised as, say, stamp collecting.
While we’re struggling to put precise dates on some breakthroughs in the early years of card production, much of the history of trading cards has been encyclopaedically documented.
A Mickey Mantle card. They are chased around card sales and yard sales across the States.
The most valuable cards have their own near-legendary history: Honus Wagner withdrawing his image rights (as we would say now); the 1952 Mickey Mantle card that was so late into production that box after unsold box was ditched in the Atlantic after the season ended.
This includes grading. Sports cards were, for most part, designed to be used by kids as a cheap, throwaway diversion - famously, stuck in bike-wheel spokes to make the sound of a motor cycle.
Millions upon millions of them were produced, briefly enjoyed, and discarded. Condition is a key determinant of value.
There are at least four grading systems used in the US market: CGC (Certified Guaranty Company), PSA (Professional Sport Authenticator), MBA (Mike Baker Authenticated) and BGS (Beckett Grading System).
Each is slightly different, but operate to recognisable common principals and all are broadly accepted in card trading and selling circles. If you start collecting, you’ll soon find yourself conifidently assessing CGC or PSA numbers.
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