Index of Movie Cards & Collectibles to 1919

Movie Cards and Collectibles to 1919

Movie specific collectibles needed the star system. While some earlier sets are featured in the pages linked below they are theatrical based sets which often did include several personalities who later became movie stars. As the decade turned to 1910 postcards were the mostly likely place to collect a movie face.

But our hobby really began to bloom about the time D.W. Griffith rose to greatest prominence mid-decade. The war soon nipped our collectibles in the bud but they did prosper, especially in America, during the mid and late 1910s. Trading cards were issued with a variety of products and even as souvenir box sets. Fans began to request photos. The movie house itself offered a wide variety of ephemera. The movies and baseball were popular subjects for promoting a wide variety of products from food to, of course, tobacco.

Our earliest popularly collected film stars featured on cardboard and ephemeral items include Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish; our most famous vamp, Theda Bara; Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle; and tragic names such as Wallace Reid, Mabel Normand and Olive Thomas.

The following pages describe each issue named in the title and include both a gallery and checklist naming and often showing either a complete set or all of the cards from that set that I have handled.