Tobacco card prices, 1944-1957

[trdcrdkid]

Here are three articles about tobacco cards by Preston D. Orem, published in The Sport Hobbyist in January and March 1957, that should be of interest to people here. The first two are from the January 1957 issue (volume II, number 1). The first one is a brief history of tobacco cards, sports as well as non-sports, which is notable mainly for saying that Charles Bray (then the editor of Card Collector's Bulletin) had over 2,000 Old Judges. I assume those are still in the hobby somewhere -- maybe I even own some of them! Editor Charles Brooks reprinted this article in the February-March 1959 issue of The Sport Hobbyist, after he had started getting it typeset so it looked much more professional.

The second article, from the same issue, is particularly interesting to me. Orem got a hold of the first eight years of Card Collector's Bulletin, from 1937 to 1945, and figured out the average auction sale price of various tobacco (baseball) card sets in 1944-45, when CCB (under Jefferson Burdick) held the first card auctions ever. Orem then figured the average sale price of the same sets in the CCB auctions of 1955 and 1956, and put together a table showing the trends. Very cool, for me at least.

The third article is from the March 1957 issue of The Sport Hobbyist (volume II, number 3). In it, Orem goes through almost all of the baseball N and T cards listed in the American Card Catalogue, comparing the prices given in the Catalogue (I assume the 1953 edition) with the actual market prices he had encountered in buying these cards over the previous year. For some reason he doesn't include T212s, even though he was in California where they would have been plentiful. Anyway, this is also pretty cool, giving the earliest market prices for some of the scarcer N and T sets.