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The Wonderful World Of Football Cards And Sticker Albums

Rob Jovanovic

When not playing Subbuteo or rearranging the Shoot League Ladders on a Saturday tea-time to take in that afternoon's results, the rest of the week for your average 1960s or 70s schoolboy was largely given over to amassing the football card collection, and, later, its successor the sticker annual. The cards were eagerly purchased at the newsagent's, complete with luminous stick of pink gum; they were 'skimmed' against a brick wall in some complicated game in the playground, swapped with school mates, fought over, more were purchased . . . yet somehow you still ended up with only the Birmingham City first team. They were the Pokemon cards of the Wilson governments; and today they are as collectable as their modern-day Japanese equivalent. In this (first ever) history of the football card and sticker annual Rob Jovanovic traces the history of the playing card right back to the golden age of the cigarette card (in turn a development from nineteenth-century French business cards), charting its development through the decades upto the modern-day sticker album. In doing so, the book provides a nostalgic, photographic history of the game