I recently picked up a token issued by A.E. Schmidt of St Louis MO. It's an octagonal token from "The Canary" (city? state? date? unknown) marked "Good For 5c In Trade". The token is uniface other than a company imprint on the reverse identifying the manufacturer. Apparently, A.E. Schmidt was a billiard company that got into manufacturing various merchant tokens between 1890 and 1930. They appear to have been quite prolific, based on numerous hits on various search engines (including several here in the "Share Your Exonumia" thread). I've reached out to the company (it's still in business) to ask if they have archives of their token production. Fingers crossed. Does anyone else have an A.E. Schmidt (or, apparently also E.A. Schmidt?) token that they'd like to share?
Prior to Prohibition, would it be reasonable to say that *most* billiard halls (except those run by teetotallers) were also saloons? Do you know of any books or articles that analyze how much of 19th century billiard revenues came from food vs. booze vs. fees for the tables?
