Vintage George Petty Pin-Up 🎨 Trading Card Set, Factory-Sealed 1990s Box by 21st Century Archives

Remember George Petty's Pin-Ups? 🎨 Vintage 1990s Trading Card Set, Factory Sealed, 21st Century Archives

Size: 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"

Factory-sealed in its original shrink-wrap, never opened.

🐰 A Sealed Box, Never Opened

This is a factory-sealed 50-card box, "The Petty Girl - Classic Pinup Art by George Petty, Premium Collectible Trading Cards," produced by 21st Century Archives of Royal Oak, Michigan in 1994. The front carries one of the set's images blown up large against black: a Petty pin-up in a pink bunny costume, one gloved hand raised. The back previews another - a figure in a lavender gown, bare-backed, reaching skyward - next to the box's own pitch for the set: "The Petty Girl was to print what Harlow and Grable were to film. George Petty was to the American woman what Norman Rockwell was to the family. Without George Petty's Petty Girl, there would have been no Varga Girl or Playboy Playmate, for the entire concept of a pinup in a magazine was his. Prior to the Petty Girl, there had been the girl on the magazine cover, but never the girl in the magazine." Below it, Petty's own red signature and one of his gag captions, "I want to report this phone out of order - I haven't had a call all evening." This is Series 1: the box carries no "II" - 21st Century Archives followed it with a Petty Girl II set the next year.

The fifty cards inside follow a fixed, published checklist, each one a specific, numbered image with a card back written by Reid Stewart Austin, pulled from Petty's work across the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. Card #49 was never published anywhere before this set. Randomly seeded through the boxes is the real chase piece: one of five Ridgid Tool insert cards.

🖌️ George Petty

George Petty started out a south Louisiana boy - George Brown Petty IV, born in 1894 in Abbeville, the seat of Vermilion Parish. His family moved up to Chicago just before the turn of the century, where his father, George III, did well as a photographer of young women, madonnas, and nudes, and young George spent his free time in that studio, retouching photographs and learning the airbrush. I get a kick out of that: the fellow who'd put the pin-up inside the magazine learned his tools in his dad's photo shop. He studied art in Chicago, then trained at the Academie Julian in Paris until 1916, before opening his own studio back in Chicago in 1926, doing commercial work for accounts like Marshall Field's and Atlas Beer. Everything changed with the first issue of Esquire in October 1933: Petty's pin-up ran in the magazine from that debut issue, and he's credited with more or less inventing the magazine gatefold - the fold-out page that let his figure run full-length across an extra panel. His regular Esquire run lasted through 1941; he came back only for the 1955 and 1956 Esquire calendars, billed as "The Petty Girl is Back." Along the way he painted for Old Gold cigarettes, Jantzen swimsuits, and Ridgid Tool, and one of his April 1941 Esquire girls became the nose art on the B-17 Memphis Belle. Two of his images ended up on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Alberto Vargas took over the Esquire pin-up pages from Petty in 1940 - which is exactly the lineage the box's own back panel is claiming above.

🔧 The Ridgid Tool Cards

The one-of-five Ridgid Tool insert cards are reproductions of Petty's own commissioned artwork for the Ridge Tool Co.'s 1952 shop calendar (he painted their 1953 one too), from the same Ohio pipe-wrench maker that ran a calendar every year from 1949 to 2016. Petty painting for a tool company's shop wall is a real, documented piece of his career.

🖋️ Reid Stewart Austin

The fifty card backs were written by Reid Stewart Austin, who was Playboy's art director and Alberto Vargas's editor there before writing these in 1994 - three years ahead of his own book on Petty, "Petty: The Classic Pin-Up Art of George Petty," with a foreword by Hugh Hefner and an introduction by Petty's daughter, Marjorie. The box doesn't undersell him, either - its back panel bills him as a "world-renowned authority."

🏛️ 21st Century Archives

21st Century Archives, out of Royal Oak, Michigan, built a whole run of pin-up and illustration card sets through the 1990s: Vargas Pin-Up Girls in 1992 and 1993, this Petty Girl set in 1994 alongside a Bettie Page and Hollywood Pin-Ups set, then Petty Girl II, Gil Elvgren, and J.C. Leyendecker sets in 1995. Every one of them ran under license - this box's spine reads "Produced under license from the Petty Family."