The Honus Wagner: The Rarest of All Baseball Cards
Source: Treasures of the New York Public Library
Distributed with Sweet Caporal Cigarettes, ca. 1909–11, the Honus Wagner baseball card is perhaps the most revered of all 20th-century baseball memorabilia, and — because only a very limited number of cards survived after Wagner caused it to be pulled from circulation — it is touted as the rarest of all baseball cards. But Wagner was no anti-smoking zealot. His granddaughter set the record straight in 1992: “He always had a wad of chewbacca in his mouth, and he wasn’t against tobacco at all. His concern was he didn’t want children to have to buy tobacco in order to get his card….
