Nonsports Nonsense...European Flair

 

At some point last year I must have had some extra money burning a hole in my pocket.  I was checking out various auctions of cards and other things when I came across 3 lots of interesting, old looking cards.  At first when I saw the card above I thought of Nachos Grande's post of A&G's Flag's of All Nation's.  Those cards are very old (1887!).  So I bid and won, the 3 lots of cards.

So far it seems the cards I have are all German tobacco cards.  And all of them are pre-war.  I've been doing a lot of research on these and there seems to be a dearth of information about these cards.  

For now I'm focused on 3 cards that were all part of the same set.

These cards are about the same size as an American Tobacco cards.  As you can tell these were included with Lloyd Cigarettes.  The bolded line translates to "Shipping flags of the world merchant fleet".  "Bild Nr. 370" translates to "Picture No 370" and the card says this is the Canadian merchant flag for Canadian National Steamships.

This is card 327 and it represents the Belgium merchant flag for Red Star Line.  "Arbeitsbereich" translates to "Workspace".   It's "workspace" was between Antwerp and New York, offering both passenger and cargo service.

The highlight line "Die Sammlung besteht aus 396 Bildern" loosely translates to "The Collection consists of 396 Pictures".  So at least now I know how large the set is.

This card is interesting and represents a French shipping company that operated in and around the Mediterranean sea offering both passenger and cargo services.  As far as I can tell, "CHP" means Compagnie Havraise Peninsulaire, which loosely translated means the Peninsula Harbor Company (my French is rusty).  

The bottom few lines of these cards seems to be an offer of an album for your cards, similar to what Topps or Panini would often do for their stickers.  So there seems to be an album for this set but I have yet to find it.

Judging by ebay, these cards were all issued in 1933 and seem to be very affordable.  However, I don't think I'll be chasing this set yet as I've got other vintage sets to chase.  Nevertheless I found these to be a pleasant distraction from my normal, every day sports cards collecting activity.

There are quite a few of these German tobacco cards to sort through, so I'll be posting more of them as I'm researching their histories so stay tuned!