Album 201, page 13

These small trade cards were issued in a series of fifty to promote Allen & Ginter Cigarettes in the United States. Displaying an astonishing variety of fans, the cards clearly demonstrate that fanmania had crossed the Atlantic by 1889. That fans appear prominently in the advertising of a cigarette brand reflects an attempt to lure fashionable upper- and middle-class female customers. By the early 1880s, cigarettes were being mass-produced in the United States, and although women were discouraged from smoking in the 1880s and 1890s, "ladies’ smoking clubs" nonetheless began to appear. Since the fans depicted were associated with European fashions, these advertisements may well have been geared to society women who began smoking to mimic the worldliness of continental women.