collectable cards or trading cards

      A trading card (or collectible card) is a small card, usually made out of paperboard or thick paper, which usually contains an image of a certain person, place or thing (fictional or real) and a short description of the picture, along with other text (attacks, statistics, or trivia). There is a wide variation of different types of cards. Modern cards even go as far as to include swatches of game worn memorabilia, autographs, and even DNA hair samples of their subjects.

Trade cards advertising the product
(not to be confused with trading cards).

      Trading cards are traditionally associated with sports; baseball cards are especially well-known. Cards dealing with other subjects are often considered a separate category from sports cards, known as non-sports trading cards. These often feature cartoons, comic book characters, television series and film stills. In the 1990s, cards designed specifically for playing games became popular enough to develop into a distinct category, collectible card games. These tend to use either fantasy subjects or sports as the basis for game play.

      Trade cards are the ancestors of trading cards. Some of the earliest prizes found in retail products were cigarette cards — trade cards advertising the product (not to be confused with trading cards) that were inserted into paper packs of cigarettes as stiffeners to protect the contents. Allen and Ginter in the U.S. in 1886, and British company W.D. & H.O. Wills in 1888, were the first tobacco companies to print advertisements. A couple years later, lithograph pictures on the cards with an encyclopedic variety of topics from nature to war to sports — subjects that appealed to men who smoked - began to surface as well. By 1900, there were thousands of tobacco card sets manufactured by 300 different companies. Children would stand outside of stores to ask customers who bought cigarettes for the promotional cards. Following the success of cigarette cards, trade cards were produced by manufacturers of other products and included in the product or handed to the customer by the store clerk at the time of purchase. World War II put an end to cigarette card production due to limited paper resources, and after the war cigarette cards never really made a comeback. After that collectors of prizes from retail products took to collecting tea cards in the UK and bubble gum cards in the US.

• Read more about artist trading cards or ATCs

Collecting cards with pictures of events in ballooning history from 1783 to 1883.

^{No. 1. Le Commandant Coutelle au siège de Mayence (1795)
No. 2. Les utopies de la navigation aérienne au siècle dernier
No. 3. Sébastien Lenormand fait la 1re expérience du parachute, Montpellier (1783)
No. 4. Descente de Jacques Garnerin en parachute (1797)
No. 5. Gay-Lussac et Biot a 4,000 mètres de Hauteur (1804)
No. 6. Le Ballon du couronnement de Napoléon
No. 7. Mort de Mme. Blanchard (1819)
No. 8. Zambeccari et ses deux compagnons dans L'Adriatique (1804)
No. 9. Mort de Harris (1824)
No. 10. Arban est recueilli par des pècheurs Italiens (1846).}

^{No. 1. Les frères Montgolfier ... (1883)
No. 2. 1re expérience aerostatique a Annonay (1783)
No. 3. Charles lance ... à Paris le premier aérostat (1783)
No. 4. Premier voyage aérien ... Pilâtre de Rozier et d'Arlandes (1783)
No. 5. Premier voyage aérien ... par Charles et Robert (1783)
No. 6. 1er essai de direction de ballons ...(1784 Guyton de Morveau)
No. 7. Traversée en balon du Pas-de-Calais par Blanchard et Jefferies (1785)
No. 8. Mort de Pilâtre de Rozier et de Romain (1785)
No. 9. Les Aérostiers de la première République
No. 10. L'Entreprenant, ballon monté par Coutelle ... bataille de Fleurus.}