Leonard Brecher Tobacco and Chewing Gum Card Collection

The Leonard Brecher Tobacco and Chewing Gum Card Collection contains baseball cards from the early 20th century. Tobacco, candy, and chewing gum companies printed trade cards or advertising cards to include with their products. Cards in this digital collection come from the American Tobacco Company, American Caramel Company, Colgan Gum Company (of Louisville, Kentucky), John H. Dockman & Sons, and the Standard Caramel Company, and primarily date between 1909 and 1911.

Received by the University of Louisville Art Library in 1969 as a donation from Leonard Brecher, the collection contains 356 baseball cards and 86 cards with bird images. Of these, 154 of the baseball cards are included in the digital collection. See the finding aid for a complete listing.

The remaining cards can be found in other digital collections:

• Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Baseball Cards 1887-1914.
• Miami University Libraries - Digital Collections. Shields Trade Card & Advertising Collection.
• New York Public Library. NYPL Digital Gallery. Cigarette Cards: ABCs.
• University of Georgia Libraries. Richard B. Russell Library. Legends of the Dead-Ball Era: Vintage Baseball cards from the Collection of Senator Richard B. Russell.
• Wake Forest University. WakeSpace Digital Archive. Duke Tobacco Company Cigarette Cards.

When possible, the set number for each card has been included in the catalog record. This number is based on the classification system established by Jefferson Burdick in The American Card Catalog and is a common way to refer to series of American baseball cards.

Colton Wilson scanned the cards from July-October 2009 on an Epson Expression 800 flatbed scanner. Each bookplate was scanned as a 600 ppi, 24-bit RGB TIFF file. Images were uploaded as lossy JPEG2000 files of Maximum quality using CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software version 5.1.

Emily Symonds researched and created metadata in accordance with the University of Louisville Digital Initiatives data dictionary (PDF). Titles that were supplied by the cataloger are indicated in the Description. Gail Gilbert and Kathy Moore provided collection assistance. Terri Holtze designed the HTML pages.

In 2022, the University Libraries moved to a new digital repository called Hyku. This process was completed by Rachel Howard in Fall of 2022. Terri Holtze designed the HTML and LibGuide pages. Trish Blair re-worked the finding aids to create one cohesive guide.