What are Pokémon phone cards?

The telephone card, terehon kādo, shortened to teleca, was NTT's prepaid magnetic card for Japan's public telephones. You bought calling time in advance, printed on the card as a denomination in units: the standard cards were 50 units for ¥500 and 105 units for ¥1,000, and the phone drew the balance down from the card's magnetic stripe as you talked. Because the face of the card was a blank rectangle carried in every wallet in the country, it became advertising space, gift and collectible at once, and companies printed limited designs by the thousand.

Pokémon designs were issued steadily from 1996 into the early 2000s; a modern photo checklist documents 69 designs. They were never a set. No shop ever sold "the Pokémon phone cards": each card belongs to its own promotion, a CoroCoro or Televi-Kun magazine lottery, the opening of a Pokémon Center, a summer movie campaign, a TOMY or Banpresto toy tie-in, or the ANA Pokémon Jet. Print runs ran from mass-distributed magazine cards down to lottery prizes awarded to a few dozen winners, which is why the family ranges from the familiar to the nearly unfindable.

This shelf documents them as what they are: printed artifacts of the years when Pokémon lived in wallets. The next page walks the designs year by year; the page after teaches you to read one.