Western-style playing cards originally came to Japan ... The most popular in the late 1800s were hanafuda, cards printed with beautiful, colorful images of flowers. The yakuza often used hanafuda ...

and cartes de visite (the “visitor cards” were extremely popular in Europe and the U.S. in the late 1800s), cut and manipulated to fit into those illustrated scenes, or affixed to animals or ...

In the late 1800s, photographs this size were rare. To get a baseball card, you had to turn in 10 cigarette pack coupons. The owner had to smoke 200 cigarettes to get just one. "Back then you didn ...