I am almost 120 years too late to respond to this advertisement, but nonetheless it is my jam:
This was a half-page advertisement in the 1895 publication Gay Life In Paris: How Life is Enjoyed by the People of that Great Metropolis. For reference, that same ten cents at the time would buy you a cup of coffee and a slice of pie in a restaurant in New York City.
Advertisement text reads:
French Female Beauties.
If you enjoy nice photographs of female beauties, here is your opportunity. For only ten cents, we will send to you forty photographs of the most charming French girls in tights. Each photograph is mounted on a card and the lot of 40 card photos makes an exquisite, unique, and petite collection. Ordinarily, you know, pictures of actresses in tights cost ten cents each, but here we make the remarkable offer of forty separate card photographs. Send ten cents, silver or stamps, to Keystone Book Co., Box 1634, Philadelphia, Pa., or to the firm from whom you purchased this little volume.
I suspect the key word here is “petite” — meaning the photographs, not so much, necessarily, the actresses in tights. Probably we are talking baseball-card size or smaller; some of the cigarette cards of that era were about half the size of the modern baseball card.
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