In the late 1940s, the Syracuse-based electrician Jefferson R. Burdick (1900–1963) began donating what would amount to more than 300,000 items of printed ephemera to The Met. Burdick, who began collecting when he was around ten years old, amassed advertising inserts, postcards, posters, cigar bands, and other types of printed materials dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1960s. The bulk of his collection consists of trade cards from this period produced in the United States. A. Hyatt Mayor, The Met’s forward-thinking curator of prints and photographs who wrote extensively about prints as a record of a society’s visual culture, accepted Burdick’s donation at a time when most art institutions in the United States were vying for the best quality examples of artworks rather than the stuff of everyday life. But Mayor set a condition: The Met would accept the gift only if Burdick agreed to organize and catalogue the material into albums himself—a task that ultimately took around fifteen years. Today, collectors of American printed ephemera still use the cataloguing system that Burdick devised to identify his collectables.
Though Burdick allegedly never attended a baseball game, a major part of his vast gift is one of the largest collections of baseball cards now held by any public institution. Baseball cards evolved from a tradition of the trade card—or business card—that emerged in the seventeenth century as a means for businesses and individuals to advertise their services. In the 1880s, tobacco companies began to issue trade cards with illustrations of baseball players and a variety of other types of figures and subjects, such as exotic animals, nations’ flags—even newspaper editors (63.350.202.35.6). These collectible cards were in part a product of the growing popularity of cigarettes, which took off during the American Civil War (1861–65) as a convenient, portable alternative to tobacco pipes and plug chew. Cardboard trade cards also served a practical purpose, stiffening soft cigarette packs and thereby protecting cigarettes from damage when stuffed into a smoker’s pocket.
Cards of baseball players were particularly popular in this era, as the game, which had roots in the Northeastern region of the U.S., expanded to the South and West during the Civil War years, when soldiers took up the game at moments of downtime. Baseball flourished in the aftermath of the war not only as professional entertainment, but also as a pastime enjoyed by nonprofessionals in cities across the U.S. Burdick’s collection includes Allen & Ginter’s 1888 World’s Champions series, which is among the first baseball cards produced (63.350.202.43.13). The images in the World’s Champions series were printed using new commercial techniques, and included ten portraits of baseball players along with those of other athletes and celebrities (63.350.202.43.45; 63.350.202.43.22). Around the same time, Goodwin & Company issued sepia-toned photographs of ball players that were large and attractive enough to be displayed in one’s cabinet, garnering them the name “cabinet cards.”
In 1890, industrialist James Buchanan “Buck” Duke founded the American Tobacco Company through a merger of several tobacco manufacturers. Without the threat of competition from other tobacco corporations, the American Tobacco Company essentially ceased production of trade cards. That changed in 1909, two years after Duke was indicted for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlawed monopolies. To make a profit before the inevitable dissolution of his company, Duke issued more than 500 baseball cards informally referred to as the White Border series, which includes the most sought-after card in collecting history: the famed Honus Wagner card (63.350.246.206.378). Wagner was a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates (and a future Hall of Famer) who reputedly insisted that the production of cards featuring his image stop after just a few hundred were printed, rendering the card extremely rare. Legend has it that Wagner did not want his portrait to be used to market tobacco to children; some have speculated that he was in fact protesting the use of his image without compensation. Around the time that the White Borders were issued, manufacturers of products other than tobacco joined the competition. An example is Cracker Jack, which produced a striking set of cards in 1914 and 1915 in which player portraits are set against a vivid red background (Burdick 315, E145.104).
In the late 1920s, the Fleer Corporation, which produced gums and sweets, developed a formula for bubble gum. Prior to this development, gum was generally marketed to adults as a medicinal product. With the advent of bubble gum, Fleer and other chewing gum companies began to promote their products to children and young adults and, in the 1930s, surpassed tobacco manufacturers as the leading producers of baseball cards. During the Great Depression, the collecting and trading of baseball cards provided an inexpensive alternative to attending baseball games for those who wanted to engage with America’s favorite pastime. Chewing gum companies hired skilled illustrators to produce sets like Goudey’s Big League Chewing Gum, a richly illustrated 240-card issue of 1933, and Leaf Gum’s 1948–49 set, which includes Jackie Robinson’s rookie card (Burdick 325, R319.53; Burdick 326, R401-1.30).
Baseball reached unprecedented popularity in the 1950s, in part thanks to the ability of middle- and upper-class families to watch televised games from their living rooms. During the immediate postwar period, baby boomers constituted an expanded consumer base for chewing gum, and two top companies of the period—Topps and Bowman—competed for exclusive rights to players’ portraits (Burdick 327, R406-5.305; Burdick 328, R414-5.2). In 1952, designers at Topps developed the prototype for what would become the modern baseball card by enlarging its size, adding the player’s autograph and team name to the front, and adding the player’s statistics to the back (Burdick 328, R414-6.1). Topps’s sales soared as the company established a standard of design that was highly attractive to collectors, and by 1956, it was able to buy out Bowman, its steepest competition. Topps remains the foremost producer of baseball cards to this day.
When Burdick began the fifteen-year process of donating and cataloguing his collection, he sent boxes of materials to The Met from his home in upstate New York. Perhaps due to his deteriorating health—he developed chronic, crippling arthritis beginning in his early thirties—he relocated to a rented room in a Lower Manhattan hotel in the late 1950s, which put him closer to the Museum. There, at a desk in the Department of Prints, where he became a fixture and was often visited by friends and admirers, he adhered cards to album pages. According to an introduction by Mayor published in a directory of Burdick’s collection, Burdick pasted down his last card on January 10, 1963, put on his coat, and declared, “I shan’t be back.” He checked himself into a hospital the next day and died there on March 13, aged sixty-three. Burdick’s gravestone aptly reads: “One of the greatest card collectors of all times.”