Baines Shield Cards (framed flight)

The playground currency of the first football generation — shield-shaped chromolith cards, bold as banners.

Work: shield-shaped chromolithograph trade cards
Maker: J. Baines Ltd., Bradford
Date: 1880s–1900s
Era: The Victorian game · 1870–1900
Source: J. Baines Ltd., Bradford, 1891 · Wikimedia Commons

Collecting is the first form of supporting.

This form has a living descendant: set your own date as a fixture bill →

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

Before stickers, before cigarette cards: John Baines of Bradford printed boyhood itself. From the 1880s his shield-shaped chromolithograph cards — every club a coat of arms in a boy’s pocket — were traded, flicked, and treasured across the industrial north by the first generation to grow up with the game. The heraldry-shaped die cut made supporters of schoolboys; collecting is the first form of supporting. Sold here as the flight — six cards framed together — because the set is the product: no single shield carries what a wall of them does.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

Baines Shield Cards (framed flight), printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Baines Shield Cards (framed flight) framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of shield-shaped chromolithograph trade cards — J. Baines Ltd., Bradford, 1880s–1900s — from the copy held by J. Baines Ltd., Bradford, 1891 · Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

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