Thursday, May 22, 2014

Justified uses tobacco card set decoration

This screen shot shows an 1880s ad poster for N8 cigarette cards
on the set of a roadhouse on the FX cable series Justified.
Somewhere in Hollywood I think there is a set decorator who collects 1880s-1910s tobacco cards and premiums.

For a couple of seasons now I've noticed an Allen & Ginter point-of-purchase poster on the set of the FX cable cop show Justified.

The poster hangs on the wall just inside the door of Audrey's roadhouse/whorehouse somewhere in the hills and hollers of Harlan County, Ky. There really is a Harlan County, on Kentucky's southeast border with Virginia.

On the show, Audrey's is the headquarters for the show's principal bad guy, Boyd Crowder. 


Modern reprints of the
1889 A&G fish-card
poster are readily available.
The screen shot posted here was taken from one of the episodes toward the end of this season. It's a good thing I didn't wait for the final show, because on the season finale a potted tree had been moved in front of the poster, mostly obscuring it.

The poster is certainly a modern reproduction as original Allen & Ginter non-sports card posters of the 1880s-1890s sell for several thousand dollars. The piece pictures the complete set of 50 1889 A&G "50 Fish From American Waters" insert cards, cataloged as N8 in the American Card Catalog.

The poster on the wall at Audrey's looks to be about 16" x 28". Allen & Ginter advertising posters of the era were produced in a variety of sizes. In fact, they are still being produced today in a variety of sizes. The N8 fish poster is available all over eBay and other venues in several sizes and materials. You should be able to land one of your own for under $20.

In poking around the internet for pictures, I discovered that I'm not the first person to blog about the appearance of the poster on Justified. Some time back Bill Boehm mentioned the poster on his blog, Thorzul.blogspot.com .

Tomorrow I'll share another of my television tobacco premium "finds."

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