Bibliophemera

Collectible trading cards (not to be confused with business trade cards) can be traced back to the 1700s, but the heyday for such paper collectibles seems to have been the late 1800s through early 1900s. Included in that time frame is the popular cigarette card , issued with tobacco products of the day. Images on the cards could be of famous people, animals, places, or events. In addition to advertising the tobacco company, they also served a practical purpose of shoring up the flimsy packaging in which they were inserted. Among the more popular images in America for cigarette cards were those of  professional baseball players. Their collectible value has grown over the years, with one player in particular, Honus Wagner , eclipsing the million dollar mark. Across the pond in Great Britain, there is no answer to the Wagner card, but tobacco companies did issue their own cigarette cards with images of a variety of celebrities and well-known personalities in various walks of life...

Here is a Foyles bookmark, complemented by a model of a van the bookstore used (or may have used) long ago to transport inventory to and from its shop. Foyles was founded in 1903 by the Foyle brothers and today they are still independently owned. But they've branched out from the flagship location on Charing Cross Road, a London street known for its booksellers and put in the spotlight in Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road . Penny Mountain and Christopher Foyle authored a history of the book store in 2003 to celebrate a century of business: Foyles: A Celebration . I've had the bookmark for awhile now, but the model van is a recent purchase thanks to an unintended search result on ebay. It reminded me of the old Matchbox Cars I collected as a kid. And like the Matchbox Cars, the Foyles van was made in England. This model is Issue 25, a Morris Minor Van in the Days-Gone line made by Lledo, a company co-founded in 1982 by the former president of Matchbox, coincidentally. T...