Side by Side: 1934 Wills Famous Film Stars, Both Sizes

Last night I spent some time with the 1934 Wills Famous Film Stars Tobacco Card page.

The page already offered a gallery showing the complete 100 card set. I've adjusted that gallery, as I'm working to adjust all of our galleries, to show all of the images on a single page. Removing pagination means you can scroll through the entire gallery, from the first card to the last, in one fell swoop now.

More importantly I've added this image towards the top of the page:

The Sylvia Sidney cards shown above are both 1934 Wills Famous Film Stars cards. The card on the left measures approximately 2-1/16" x 2-5/8 inches. The card on the right measures 1-7/16" X 2-5/8 inches.

Same height, different widths.

If you can imagine the cards back where they came from in 1934, inside a W.D. & H.O. Wills cigarette packet in Australia, then it's easier to associate the difference in card size as equivalent to that of the difference between a packet of 10 or 20 cigarettes.

Unfortunately I don't have any of the original cigarette packets on hand, but there are images of them all over the web including this colorful gallery on a UK-based website and a number of empty packets from all over the world available from various eBay sellers.

Here are the reverse sides of the same Sylvia Sidney cards as shown up above:

As you can see not only the same text but even the same card number. All 100 cards match like this in each of the two differently sized 1934 Wills Famous Film Stars cigarette card sets.

It's no surprise that the larger card has a little more value than the smaller one. After all, it cost more to buy your cigarettes 20 at a time than it did 10 at a time and thus there would be more smaller packets containing the smaller cards sold. Card values today are simply a result of supply and demand.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the larger cards are, simply by virtue of their size, slightly more aesthetically pleasing as well.

Besides updating the Gallery and information on the 1934 Wills Famous Film Stars page I've also uploaded several (50-60) higher grade examples of the larger cards to the Immortal Ephemera Store. This section of the store is embedded on the updated page just below the gallery and cards are available for purchase directly from that same page.