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Playing Card Chat ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ => A Cellar of Fine Vintages => Topic started by: tobyedwards on August 15, 2025, 12:39:24 PM
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In the "Here we go again!" department, the title of this post is not meant to deliberately deceive the visitor to this website but is intended to indicate that, although the deck I am about to describe may be a new discovery to playing card collectors given that it is not listed in the Hochman/Dawson encyclopedia or the Catalog of Playing Card Cigarette Inserts by Alex Clays issued as a supplement to the June, 2024 issue of Clear the Decks, I believe it is already known to tobacco card collectors by the reference C252 in the World Tobacco Index even though I could not find any pictures in support of this listing.
The deck in question is a set of most likely 52 tobacco insert playing cards issued by Chas. J. Mitchell & Co. of Toronto, that is quite different from their Hochman ICA11 listing. Perhaps, this set may merit inclusion in that reference as the future new ICA13 listing given that my previous posting regarding a newly discovered set of tobacco insert cards issued by D. Ritchie & Co. of Montreal might occupy a possible new ICA12 listing. I do not know when these cards were issued but it seems likely that the early part of the first decade of the 20th century would seem to be appropriate given that the images of the actresses are similar to those appearing in a smaller sized set issued by Ogden's Tobacco Co. of Liverpool issued circa 1900 (Alex Clays reference AC106). As is the case with the other known Mitchell set, I will once again state the obvious here, namely, this would appear to be a very rare set.
I have only managed to recently acquire 8 sample cards from this set (4 spades & 4 hearts, pictured below, front & back) and can, therefore, only base my conclusions on what I have observed so far. Unfortunately, none of these 8 cards is a court card but I believe that they would have been standard as are the pip cards. These Mitchell cards have different named actresses on the backs which are larger sized versions that show more of the original image than space allowed for on the Ogden's cards. I have provided a picture of the same 4 actresses from this latter set so that the viewer can see the difference between the two sets. I also found it interesting to note that the one actress is named "Rocke" in the Mitchell set but is named "Rorke" in the Ogden's set, so quality control was an issue somewhere in this instance. I currently do not know if a complete set consisted of 52 different named actresses on the back or, as is the case with several actress/beauties sets from this era, a lesser number with duplicate images appearing on cards with different face values.
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I have managed to obtain some additional cards from this set which will enable me to provide pictures, both front and back, of the two missing suits, diamonds and clubs, while also answering a couple of the questions I had posed in my initial post.
As can be seen from the photo of the diamonds suit, one of the cards shown is a court card, so it can now be said with certainty that the courts are, indeed, standard just like the pip cards.
The viewer will also notice that the 8 of Diamonds features the actress Kate Rocke on the back. She also appears on the 4 of Spades (shown above) and so we now know that the same actress can appear on multiple cards within the same set which is akin to the treatment that we see in the Ogden's set. Whether or not it is possible to assemble a complete 52-card set featuring all different actresses remains to be seen.