Before the mid-1970s, there were no baseball card price guides in anything like the modern sense. There was the American Card Catalog, with its very approximate prices for average cards in different sets (plus a few rarities like T206 Wagner and Plank), and occasional attempts to survey actual market prices for tobacco cards, such as Preston Orem's in 1957 (which I posted about here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217334) and Buck Barker in 1962 (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217680). In the first half of the 1970s there were some more attempts; George Robert Martin did an occasional price survey in The Ballcard Collector, and John Stommen briefly reported on auction prices realized in Sports Collector's Digest in late 1973 and early 1974 (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=216343). Dave Meiners and Dave Goldsman wrote about card price trends in SCD in 1974 and 1976 (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=216494), but mainly in order to complain about prices rising above what they supposedly "should" be.
It was not until 40 years ago, in 1977, that the first really systematic attempts to track and report on market prices of baseball cards began. The pioneer in this regard was, of course, Dr. James Beckett, then a professor of statistics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio as well as a serious baseball card collector. In the fall of 1976, Beckett distributed his first price survey through hobby channels, and reported the results early in 1977. He only asked about prices for an average card in VG-EX condition for each set, because that's the way "serious" collectors had traditionally thought about them; the idea of paying more for "superstar" cards was still kind of controversial, believe it or not. The only "superstar" card that Beckett asked about in that first survey was 1954 Topps Hank Aaron, which had been rising in price ever since Aaron broke Ruth's home run record, and which was the first "rookie" card (in the modern sense) to gain attention in the hobby. See this post, where I scanned Beckett's 1977 price survey and the results, along with his second price survey in 1978:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=216495
Later in 1977, Dan Dischley of The Trader Speaks decided to revive John Stommen's short-lived idea of reporting auction results. Auctions had been part of the hobby for decades (see my post about the first card auction, in 1943, here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=239891), but they had become more important through the 1970s as rapidly rising prices made it difficult for sellers to know what they should charge for a card. This was especially true of superstar cards, which were rising in price much more quickly than common cards, especially in the second half of the 1970s. Dischley went to Lew Lipset, who had only become seriously involved in the hobby a couple of years earlier, and asked if he would be interested in writing a monthly column on recent card auction results, as well as anything else he wanted to write about. This would be a sort of monthly complement to Beckett's annual price survey, with a focus on actual sale prices realized for specific cards or sets.
Lipset agreed, and his first column appeared in the October 1977 Trader Speaks (with his name misspelled in the title, a mistake that was corrected the following month). He would continue writing the column monthly for the next several years (occasionally missing a month, like February 1978), and it gradually evolved away from reporting auction results and into broader discussions of cards and card sets, leading into Lew's great work on his Encyclopedia of Baseball Cards in the mid-80s, and his newsletter "The Old Judge". This started in the August 1978 column, when he began a descriptive survey of all the Topps and Bowman sets, though he continued reporting auction results.
Below I've scanned the first year of Lew's column, from October 1977 through September 1978. You can read it for yourself, but of particular interest to modern collectors is the June 1978 column, in which he focused on the 1952 Topps Mantle, which was already rising in price a lot faster than many people expected (though not nearly as fast as it would rise in 1979-80). He followed up over the next couple of months with more reports on sales of the 1952 Mantle. After the September 1978 column, I've added the "Collector of the Month" feature on Lew from the October 1978 issue. I might post some of the later columns if there's enough interest.
October 1977
November 1977
December 1977
January 1978
March 1978
April 1978
May 1978
June 1978
July 1978
August 1978
September 1978
From October 1978
