Thirteenth in a season-long series
As promised in my last post, about baseball’s first fans, it seemed wise to distinguish them from pioneer collectors, though certainly they overlapped. Nineteenth-century saloonkeepers Harry Venn and Mike Henry were fans (of the Gothams and Atlantics, respectively), but if these men are recalled today it is for the case of trophy balls each kept behind the bar. Michael “Nuf Ced” McGreevy collected so much stuff related to Boston baseball that his collection was memorialized at the Boston Public Library … yet his fandom made him famous in his day, as leader of the Royal Rooters and proprietor of the Third Base Saloon, “the last stop before Home.”
Jefferson R. Burdick was the game’s greatest collector (see: https://bit.ly/44UQUtC), but he was not the first. George B. Ellard (1829–1916) was a founder of the Cincinnati Red Stockings Base Ball Club and, after their demise in 1870, kept all sorts of their memorabilia for nearly half a century; his heirs let them go at auction upon the owner’s death. But the Ellards’ interest in Reds’ relics was team specific, like that of James Whyte Davis, who preserved the records and mementos of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Arthur H. Folwell (1877–1962) and Benjamin K. Edwards (1880–1943) may stake better claims as pioneer collectors.
Folwell wrote the first general-interest article on card collecting, for The New Yorker of May 4, 1929. Writing of his boyhood 40 years earlier, when he would collect cigarette pictures despite never smoking:
I collected literally thousands of cigarette pictures…. To many a boy, back in the eighties, the pictures given with Old Judge cigarettes were the most fascinating. Birds, dudes, soldiers, flags of all nations were well enough, but miniature photographs of leading ball players in all the leagues, even the Western Association, were far and away the best. There has never been anything like the Old Judge ball players. Each was a photograph, full-length, cigarette-box size. Each season a new set was taken, in all big-league towns, so that the teams were up-to-date….
All these, somehow or other, have survived the passing years, and are in a box beside me as I write.
By 1930 or so Benjamin Kilbourne Edwards, born to wealth and himself a magnate of sorts, with ownership stakes in coal, timber, and coffee properties, had pursued his boyhood hobby into middle age. He collected not only 2,100 baseball cards (https://bit.ly/45dgvxE) but also another 10,000 in a variety of genres. Edwards enjoyed tobacco but may have acquired many of his cards direct from the manufacturers, through premium offers. Though few children were able to accumulate the complete card sets of 50 that were so regularly offered by mail order, Edwards was … even paying as much as a dollar for the flag set, so strangely desired.
Edwards may have liked the thoroughbred horse and actress pictures even more than his baseball cards, which — as Phil Michel wrote, in the afterword to Peter Devereaux’s charming book Game Faces — he carefully sealed “in cellophane packages and tucked them into collector’s albums. Handwritten want lists and duplicates available for trading accompanied many of the sets. He corresponded and traded with other prominent card collectors, including Jefferson Burdick, author of the American Card Catalog, the first major collecting guide listing tobacco card sets.”
In 1935, when not even the T-206 Honus Wagner would fetch a price in four digits, Burdick published his first story in Hobbies Magazine. Also in that momentous year for collectors, Lucy Curtis Templeton wrote, in The Knoxville News-Sentinel:
Old boys and girls who used to collect cigarette cards may be amazed to learn that those trophies which they once carried around in dingy decks bound by elastic bands are now collectors’ items. They are bought and sold in open market like stamps and coins and Sandwich glass…. [Cigarette cards] portrayed birds, flags, fishes, rulers of different countries, actors and actresses, baseball players, etc…. Parents had been known to confiscate and destroy them especially if the contraband article showed a well-nourished dancer with bare arms and knee-length skirts.
In 1947 Burdick’s collection was accepted by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Edwards collection came to the Library of Congress in 1954, eleven years after the death of its creator at one of his homes, in Beverly Hills, CA. He had bequeathed the cards to his daughter from the first of his several marriages, Elizabeth Katherine Edwards Erickson, born in 1909.
Her husband, Donovan Y. Erickson, an attorney, had become the legal guardian of Edwards’ minor son, Benjamin K. Edwards, Jr., born in 1927. The boy had lodged with his father at the Union Club in Chicago after the death of his mother in 1930. In November 1948, after the young man’s death in an automobile accident, Mrs. Erickson gave the cards, which may have been destined for him, to family friend Carl Sandburg, the Lincoln biographer and poet.
When Edwards’ collection was thus transferred, Oliver R. Barrett, the noted collector of Lincoln artifacts, fretted about the “moral aspects” of cigarette card collecting and feigned concern that his friend Sandburg would spend his days “looking at cigarette cards and not in the furtherance of American literature.”
I could be diverted so easily, but not Sandburg. He had already finished the manuscript for Lincoln Collector: The Story of Oliver R. Barrett’s Great Private Collection. In the distance was his prologue to The Family of Man (1955), the famous exhibition catalogue of images compiled by his brother-in-law, Edward Steichen.
PIONEERS: Benjamin K. Edwards was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.