Vintage Victorian Trade Card for Panama Coffee w/ Battle of Mobile Bay Image 5x7

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Auction Wizard 2000 Listing Template - AW2KLOT#:14664
Vintage Victorian Trade Card for Panama Coffee w/ Battle of Mobile Bay Image 5x7
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Bungalowblondie Trade Cards
This is an original trade card from the turn of the 19th century.  It is for the Panama Coffee company. The card is part of a series of 8 cards this is card number 1, "The Battle of Mobile, August 5, 1864". And has picture on the front of the battle with some text. On the back is an ad for the Panama Coffee Company. Measures about 5 x 7. The front bottom edge has some wrinkle in the paper, no tears, no folds, some slight writing in pencil on the back.
Guaranteed to be "old" and authentic.
5/2013
Brief History of Trade Cards  by  Ben Crane
Over a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards. These trade cards evolved from cards of the late 1700s used by tradesmen to advertise their services. Although examples from the early 1800s exist, it was not until the spread of color lithography in the 1870s that trade cards became plentiful.
By the 1880s, trade cards had become a major way of advertising America's products and services, and a trip to the store usually brought back some of these attractive, brightly-colored cards to be pasted into a scrapbook.
Some of the products most heavily advertised by trade cards were in the categories of: medicine, food, tobacco, clothing, household, sewing, stoves, and farm.
The popularity of trade cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color, such as magazines, became more cost effective.
Although trade card collecting began over 100 years ago, today's strong interest in trade cards began relatively recently. Trade cards that were bought for ten cents thirty years ago frequently bring ten dollars or more in today's market--and some have even sold for over a thousand dollars.