Allen & Ginter’s World’s Racers (A18) Album and Checklist

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

1888 Allen & Ginter World’s Racers Album (A18)

In the 19th century, tobacco companies often offered collectible albums as special premiums to consumers. This album was distributed by Allen & Ginter for their popular World’s Racers tobacco cards. The album is cataloged as A18 in the American Card Catalog.

The album features pictures of the 50 cards in their World’s Racers set (N32). The cards were originally distributed inside of packages of their cigarette products.

The album’s cover has wonderful imagery. Included is a horse racing scene with spectators as well as pictures of two of the original cigarette cards and the Allen & Ginter World’s Racers name/title.

The albums are fairly rare and include a series of loose pages held together with a string. Because the albums were not formally bound, it is fairly common to see individual pages as opposed to a complete album.

Cut Cards

The albums come up for sale on occasion but are rare. They can be found as complete albums, in individual pages, or sometimes the individual cards on each page have been cut out.

Cut out cards do hold some value but are not as valuable as the actual cards that were included in packs of cigarettes or other tobacco products. The cards in the album do not include the checklist that appeared on the backs of many of the regular cards that came with the cigarettes. However, the images of the horses and jockeys remained the same.

These albums were clearly used by collectors for different purposes. Some collectors, as mentioned, cut the cards out, preferring to have individual cards instead of the album. Others affixed their own regular cards to the album over top of the pictures on the pages as a way to store their original cards. Because of that, you will sometimes find cards that were glued to album pages, and subsequently removed, with damaged backs.

Cut cards from this set typically start at only a few dollars each. That is largely because the actual cards distributed with the cigarettes are not that expensive.