This vast category includes tobacco cards (packaged as premiums with cigarettes or, less commonly, cigars or chewing tobacco), trade cards (issued with tea, chewing gum, margarine, candy, cereal and other consumables), Victorian era trade cards (larger format cards issued as advertising for a company or merchant), postcards, thin paper issues (issued most frequently in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands and designed to be pasted into albums), telephone calling cards and collectible stickers and stamps.

Anyone interested in collecting snooker cards would do well to develop an interest in billiards (referred to as English billiards in the United States) as the history of the two games is intimately intertwined and many of the early snooker players were equally well or better known as billiards players. Most of the cards of interest to snooker collectors are tobacco cards and postcards.

The saga of tobacco cards begins in the late nineteenth century. The first cards were introduced as stiffeners in packets of cigarettes produced by the American company Allen & Ginter in the late 1880's. Competition among the many cigarette manufacturers was intense, and the new insert cards boosted sales and promoted brand loyalty. An astounding variety of colourful subjects - animals, flags, Indian chiefs, politicians, flowers, actresses, athletes - kept the collecting smoker busy.

A few years later W. D. & H. O. Wills followed suit in England, thereby initiating the first "golden age" of the tobacco card, which lasted until World War I. Production of cards necessarily declined during the war years, but thereafter increased through the 1930's, the second golden age. Cards were issued in such profusion that even today many complete sets from the early twentieth century are available in good condition for reasonable sums. The earlier twentieth century tobacco cards of interest to the snooker collector feature prominent players of the time such as Bateman, Peall and Roberts, or series of instructional billiards shots or trick shots (Billiards by John Roberts 1909, Billiards by Willie Smith 1928, Billiards by Tom Newman 1928, Trick Billiards by Newman-Mond 1934). More recent issues include the Snooker Celebrities caricature sets issued in 1988 and 1993 by Imperial Tobacco.

Please see my Epson albums of British cards issued before and after 1940 to get a flavour of the range of cards available. Those interested in becoming hopelessly involved in card collecting should investigate the Cartophilic Society of Great Britain.

(Some of the preceding information was nicked, with permission, from the writings of British card expert Andy Dankevics, whose column "The Cartophilic Connection" appears in The Amateur Billiard Player.)

Collecting billiards and snooker postcards is another area rich in history and colour. Subjects include famous players, billiard rooms and humorous scenes. As I don’t personally collect these I will refer the interested reader to Billiards and Snooker: The Postcard Album by Roger Lee for a thorough introduction.