Flashback: 1911

These aren’t baseball cards—they’re “Helmar Stamps.” In the early teens, purchasers of 10-count clamshell boxes of Helmar cigarettes found a glassine envelope tucked beneath their smokes: “Smoke HELMAR cigarettes/and carry your/POSTAGE STAMPS/in this envelope./THEY WILL NOT STICK.” The packet contained a half-dozen cancelled foreign stamps, as well as two or three poster stamps featuring baseball players (“Red” Dooin, “Lefty” Leifield, “Hooks” Witse) and vaudeville actresses (Blanche Ring, Ruth Pecan, Blossom Seeley). Each portrait, done as a black-and-white halftone engraving, is enclosed in a border so bright it might as well be a psychedelic black-light poster peeled off a Haight-Ashbury street lamp during the Orange Sunshine days. The actresses are framed with shooting stars and peacock feathers and lumpy comedy/tragedy masks that look like cartoon pigs; the ballplayers’ borders are simple enough to be legible, though the baseball gloves sort of look like a little kid’s mittens. Joe Lake, who pitched for the Browns, was two years away from retirement in this photo; “Steve” Evans (his real name was Louis) was a left-handed Cardinal who ended his career with the Baltimore Terrapins. Neither stamp fetches as much as a “Home Run” Baker, but they’re all rare: It’s hard, even for adults, to resist licking a stamp and sticking it someplace you probably shouldn’t.