Burdick Collection Visit

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Posted By: warshawlaw 

I visited the Burdick Collection at the Met for two and a half hours on Friday. Here are my impressions:

Getting into the collection is like getting into the white house. You announce yourself at the front desk of the museum, where they check your ID and call up to the prints department to verify your appointment. You are issued a pass for the library and given directions. The library room of the prints department is behind a locked door. You ring a doorbell and they buzz you into the antechamber, where they take your bags, coat (if you haven't checked it), camera, pens, etc., and you have to produce your ID again, fill out a card with your info, and read and sign a page-long rules and regulations list. Once all that is done, they lead you into the reading room.

The reading room looks just like the reading room in any library; a couple of big tables with chairs. Only in this reading room, attendants hover and you cannot pull books at will from the shelves. The attendant sets up a velvet placemat in front of you and (because the collection is housed in books) two velvet covered bolsters on either side of the mat. The book is placed inside this rig so that it never lays flat, only in a "V".

You have to know exactly what you want to see and you more or less have to direct the curators to the proper volumes. Burdick wrote and printed a guide to the collection (it is in the same typeface and paper as the ACC, so I know it was printed) breaking up the collection by volume. If you are not very up on your nomenclature, you are dead in the water. For example, Book 202 is described as "A&G 1-48, 63-65" (not exactly, just as an example) and that's all the detail you get from Burdick. I tried to pre-arrange my viewing by sending them exact set names and numbers I wanted. The head curator told me that they could only ID about half of the sets ahead of time. I was able to locate the rest inside of two minutes just by viewing the book and knowing manufacturer and ACC designation (more on the lack of knowledge of the caretakers later).

Once they know what to get, they go fetch it for you. They roll in a cart with the books of the cards you want to see and they place a book in front of you. You are not allowed to touch the cards (obviously) or to have more than one book at a time. You can turn the pages yourself.

Remember that this entire collection is one guy's stuff, arranged by him. The poor bastard sat there for three years pasting down this stuff, and you could see that as he went on, he got less and less interested in tabbing things. By the time you get into the later albums, there are virtually no tabs at all, which made finding sets a bit of a challenge.

The paramount ground rule I was told of was "no looking at baseball cards." They were very adamant about this. However, the disorganization of the collection is such that you have to look through albums to get to certain sets, meaning that I had to look at baseball sets to find the boxing sets I was there to study, which led to a kind of funny incident. I was looking for the E211 set (York Caramel boxing) and had to go through an untabbed volume loaded with every E card you could think of to do it. The curator came over and said "you are looking at baseball cards." I said "no, I am looking for the E211 set of boxing cards." I started to describe what I was looking for, her eyes glazed over, and I had to keep going. What a shame...

In terms of my research, the collection was very useful. I was able to verify the existence of many cards, found many uncatalogued variations, and was able to flesh out some checklists. Oddly enough, however, Burdick was very spotty on certain sets. He had only 1 T229 Pet/Kopec card and only 2 E211 York Caramel cards.

Now for the fun stuff you all might appreciate: Owing to the organizational issues, I was able to view some of the OJ's, CJ's, E cards, and T cards. It is obvious that Burdick cared more about completion than condition. Cards range all over the place from poor to near mint. The OJ's I saw were organized by team, with an added section of miscellaneous cards, and averaged ex. The CJs were gorgeous--obviously a near mint set. Most of the T cards were strong ex to ex-mt. The T227 Cobb was stellar ex-mt. The Fatimas had lots of cracks and creases. Burdick also had two of the Fatima style PC backed cards, but in a different book--he obviously did not consider them to be Fatimas. The common E cards from the 1920s were all razor sharp sets. The E210 set was all over the place, from poor to ex, mostly vg. The great shame of it all was that every card was friggin glued down, very firmly. the CJ Jackson was obviously an "8" when it was put into place, but is poor now.

I was surprised and saddened by how little the curators knew about the cards (as I said above,they could not even find many of the sets I needed because they did not know Burdick's nomenclature and when I tried to talk cards with them, they obviously had no idea what I was saying). It was sad as well to see just how under-utilized and under-catalogued the cards were. Burdick did a monumental job of collecting and mounting these cards, but a crappy job of cataloguing and indexing them. There are albums with literally nothing to define what is in them other than a single line entry. It appears that no work has been done to see what is in this collection over the last 40 years. In the boxing cards alone, I found literally dozens of unknown cards and variations that have been sitting there for 40 years, ready to be discovered. The head curator even admitted at the end of my visit that they don't know much about the collection. Consequently, a very valuable and very useful resource sits mostly unused and "unloved" in albums in the bowels of the museum.

The trip was an absolutely amazing experience. Burdick's collection is unparalleled and priceless. It also was a thrill to see his writing and his notations right there on the pages he mounted, and to see what he was thinking when organizing the ACC.