1975 Sports Card Catalog with prices
 

I was going through some of my old hobby publications tonight, and among the things I found were the 1976 and 1978 editions of the Sport Americana Baseball Card Checklists book by Dennis Eckes. The 1978 edition (which was actually my brother's, and included when I bought his whole card collection) has the first published price survey by Dr. James Beckett, which I just posted in another thread. The 1976 edition was mine, bought in the spring of that year at the first card shop I ever went to, and it's worn, dogeared, and annotated from being pored over by me between the ages of 10 and 15. The part I liked best about it was the 30-page "Sports Card Catalog" at the end, presumably written by Eckes, which lists most of the popular baseball card sets (plus modern football sets) with descriptions and prices. (Though the book came out in 1976, this catalog section must have been written in 1975, since it mentions the 1975 Sports Collectors Bible as forthcoming on page 83.) This section was one of the things that really got me interested in vintage cards; I also had some books about baseball cards that had a few pictures of T206s and T205s, which were cool, but this showed me all the stuff that there was to collect, even though most of it seemed hopelessly out of reach on my 50-cents-a-week allowance.

I've scanned in below the first several pages, covering N, T, and E cards, including my pencil annotations. Eckes made a few mistakes, such as identifying the Red Sun green borders set as T209 instead of T211 (and saying that there are 130 cards in the set), but I added the correct identification of T209 Contentnea in my annotation at the top of page 87. I also made some mistakes in my annotations, such as misidentifying E121 as E91 on page 88, and E91 as E90-1 on page 89. But hey, I was a kid, and I didn't have any of these cards myself except for a single T206 (Pfeister seated, Polar Bear back), which is still in my collection.

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Neat stuff David!

I like this line from the book:

T206 - "522 different plus Magie (Phillies) spelling error."


J@ntz

Thanks for sharing. I noticed at this time the hobby thought Nadja was a company, and as we know now it was merely a brand. But who would want to say "Blanke Wenneker Honus Wagner?" ....

Awesome stuff! Looks like the pic used to identify the Ty Cobb as a T206 is actually a T213, based on the font. Love seeing these old materials!

Very cool, thanks for sharing. Interesting to see t222 priced at $20 especially compared to the SF Hess cards at only $15. Also, wonder which players from the t222 were not known (assuming the number known includes the actors and other athletes).

DJ

I notice I had T222 annotated as being part of T200, another of my mistakes. Forgive me; I was 12 or 13 when I wrote that.

Time travel would be nice for card collectors. With my luck cardboard would disintegrate upon leaving the past and heading back to 2015.

Seriously, the card collecting thing is not new, but the infusion of a lot of money is relatively new.

Fifty five years ago my uncle told me cards would some day be worth a lot, but as usual I never paid attention.

t3's were big money, $10 a piece!