1908-09 Delatour Chocolates Rose Company Postcards Set (PC760)

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

It’s in the Details

Title	Greenfield’s Delatour Chocolates Rose Company Postcards (PC760)
Year	1908-09
Size	3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″
Images	Black and White
Type	Postcards
Number in Set	200+

1908-09 Greenfield’s Delatour Chocolates Rose Company Postcards (PC760) Overview

The PC760 Rose Company postcards set is one of the more famous postcard issues. However, a scarce version of the postcard also exists for Greenfield’s Delatour Chocolates.

The standard Rose Company postcards feature a black and white image of a player within a circle, the background included a baseball diamond with the majority of the front being green for the grass on the field. Small generic player images are also on the front and the set includes various baseball players. Backs include the area for the sender to write his/her message and the recipient address. The pictures used on the postcards can be found on other pre-war cards as well.

Greenfield’s Delatour Chocolates used these postcards as an advertisement for their business. The postcards are exactly the same as the regular PC760 Rose Company issues with the exception of the backs. Those have the Greenfield’s Delatour Chocolates logo printed in brown ink along with a brief ad, stating that the company had chocolates with 100 different types of centers. The chocolate was for sale individually or by the pound and the company was established in New York.

That variations exist in the set is not a surprise or anything new, really. The company made this design available to other businesses to include their own image and messaging, similar to how trade cards were utilized. What made the Delatour Chocolates cards a little more unique is that they maintained the use of the player pictures while other companies used their own logo or message in place of that. By keeping the picture of the individual players, Delatour, perhaps inadvertently, made these much more relevant in today’s times to collectors.

Dating

While the dating of the standard Rose Company postcards set has often been a point of discussion, the question of it existing prior to 1910 seems to have been confirmed. A Los Angeles Herald newspaper issue from December 7, 1908 contained an article for Walter Johnson, displaying his Rose Company postcard.

The standard issue seems likely to have been produced starting no later than 1908 and while it could have also been produced later than 1909 as well, its origins seem to date back to at least 1908.

Dating for the Delatour Chocolates issue is even murkier since it isn’t known when they began sponsoring the postcards and if they were newly printed or simply had their ads printed onto the backs of ones that had already been printed earlier. You will most commonly see them as advertised with the same 1908-09 dates, though.

Back Variations

Even though the Delatour Chocolates postcards are a variation of the Rose Company postcards, there’s actually even a variation in the Delatour set itself.

The Delatour postcards have slightly different backs. One shows the company’s location as being in the Fifth Avenue Building in New York. However, another shows the location as Barclay Street. It is unknown if the different addresses were the result of a typo, a move, or of having two separate locations at the same time.

1908-09 Greenfield’s Delatour Chocolates Rose Company Postcards (PC760) Checklist

Here is a checklist of all of the postcards known to date from the regular PC760 set.

A total of more than 200 are found in the known regular PC760 set. Due to rarity, however, it is not entirely known if all of them can be found with the Greenfield’s Delatour Chocolates back.