Collection: Victorian Trade Cards- Baby Talk

19th Century Victorian trade cards with Baseball themes are my favorite type of memorabilia to collect. First of all, they can be very difficult to come across. So the challenge of completing a set is great. More importantly, though, is that these cards can have some of the most charming or slapstick hilarious pictures on them. I've seen cards where they show a team gang tackling an umpire to cartoons of a player getting hit in the face with a ball.
From my story I wrote in September 2006:

Trade Cards are one of the more interesting hobbies to crop up in American history. It originally started in the late 1870's and thrived throughout the rest of the century. It became one of America's early fads and collecting crazes. They started out as business/ advertising cards given away to customers. The name of the establishment would be printed on the front with a simple design around the edges. Soon the designs became more ornate and customers started collecting them to put into scrapbooks. This started the age of Victorian scrapbooking in America.

Baseball themed cards represent an infinitesimally small amount of total trade cards in existence.
The set I'm highlighting from my collection is called H804-1A Baby Talk Black Borders. This is one of three different sets that exist under the Baby Talk genre. It was produced in 1880's and is complete with a total of 10 cards. As the name of the set suggest the cards have titles on the bottom left of the cards that represent the spoken word of children. There are phrases like "Tum on, ets' p'ay ball!" and "No, I Didn' stike at dot!" Most collectors consider it complete at 9, but there is one card, that has no writing on it, (on the bottom right below) that I'm convinced belongs to this set.