Determining what is vintage
 

Ten years ago, if you asked us post-war collectors, "What is considered vintage?" most of us would probably agree anything produced before 1979.

Well, ten years later, do the parameters change? Do we expand it by 10 years and now consider 1989 Topps to be vintage? After all, 1989 Topps are now 29 years old. Yeah, yeah, I know that they were mass produced and there are still cases and cases sitting in warehouses. But do we let that (mass production) determine what is considered "vintage?"

When I started collecting in 1986, a card that was 29 years old (1957 Topps) would be considered vintage. So all these years later, why doesn't the same criteria apply to us collectors? In another 10 years, when the 1989 Topps are 39 years old, will they be considered vintage then?

I guess the point is, why do we allow production runs to determine what is vintage (because that's really what it boils down to if you think about it)? At what point will 1989 Topps (or fill in any other year) be considered vintage?

Thoughts?

my opinon-
tobacco-ish cards = vintage
something like the goudeys and before = prewar
era 50's-70's = postwar
the donruss/late 80's-90-ish yrs = modern
new shiny stuff = ??? Y2K/test-tubers generation

**like how this N54 boards pretty sums it all up in each sections

I was just thinking about this today as I flipped through 1987 Topps cards to sort out stars. It's hard not to consider 30 year old cards vintage. But, I think I'll decide the vintage category into good vintage and bad vintage.

I have never considered late 70s as vintage. My cut off would be 1973, the last set with high numbers, 1974 cards being issued as a single series. 80s cards are not and will never be vintage in my mind.

To me modern starts with multiple manufacturers in 1981. For quite some time I cut off my own collection at the Brett rookie in 1975 -- should have kept it that way!!

Vintage is anything older than I am!

I'd put the cutoff in the 1970-75 range. It will be quite a while before junk era cards will be considered vintage in my opinion. I see your point about production numbers, but to me vintage is more than just a certain number of years old. There has to be some element of desirability and rarity.

When I was a kid ( 1990s) I was talking to a old time dealer. It was in Garfield NJ his name was Bob he had a mustache and was always smoking( yes in the card show ). I ask him what he thought and he said most people thought 1969 and back was vintage. He also told me that 1969 Topps WAS OVER PRODUCED. So I always just kept 1969 as the cut off for vintage. But I do agree that the 80s should be vintage in today’s world.

I just got back into collecting again this year, so FWIW... I guess I always figured "vintage" was 1980 (or a case could be made for 1979).

Mostly because there was just one company, AND we never considered the cards worth much money. That is until the price guides came out and were around (at least in my circles) in the early 80's.

But, 1973 really makes more sense because at least some of the cards were more rare.

Your definition will depend on your age

i agree with this. These arent cars...they are cards! Vintage age will keep getting older and older. What was 30 years to be vintage will now be 40 years+. in 10 years..vintage will be 50 years etc.

maybe a new category for the 80s will develop...but wont be vintage

which makes me wonder....if there is 80s music and 90s music...what will the music be called in the 00s and 10s...we just call it 2000s and 2010s? That doesnt sound as good as the 20s and 30s..

I would agree, although I would use 1972, as this was the last set with true high numbers, the 1973's being printed as a single series also, and issued that way in parts of the country. :)

I've always felt that the Topps 1985 set is final "vintage" year.

The 1985 set included the last player/manager card (Pete Rose), a farewell to Yogi Berra and great HOF veterans (Ryan, Carlton, Fingers, Reggie Jackson). Gary Carter as an Expo, I could go on forever. Anyway, it was the final set that had the "vintage feel". It also passed the torch to the next talented/bad behavior generation (Gooden, McGwire, Clemens, etc..).

Anything after 1989 can not be accepted as vintage anytime soon.

When I was a kid and was buying "old" cards, they were from the 50s and 60s. It was rare that I would stumble upon a T card or a Goudey era card, but I had a couple. It is funny to think that I thought those 1950s Topps cards seemed so old at the time when in fact they were no more than 25 years old. At 10 years of age though, 25 years is a very long time.

If I were that same kid now, using the same standard, I might be buying 1993 Topps cards, amazed at how old they are.

Unless the hobby changes significantly with regard to how cards are made it will probably always be hard for anyone who bought cards older than about 1993 to consider UV coated cards to ever be "vintage".

And final food for thought, those fairly commonly seen T-206 cards are well over a Century old now.

Vintage is just a year's worth of grapes
 

Seems like just a semantic quibble to me. Vintage is a subjective measure, as it is with wines, so it doesn't necessarily refer to value, just age. Sort of like a number of vintage card collectors.:rolleyes:

Vintage by definition means classic, important, quality and of enduring interest. I guess you have to determine what that means to you.

I believe Pete Rose actually had a separate player and manager card in the 86 and 87 sets as well.

For me, anything made after the Topps monopoly has ended will be the end of the Vintage Era and the beginning of the Era Of Gluttony.

I would agree with others who have said it largely depends on your age, when you started collecting, and what other associations or memories you have with the hobby. I started collecting out of packs at age 9 in 1986. Within a year or so I had discovered the world of "old" cards through shops, shows, and antique malls (we didn't use the word "vintage" back then...) and I remember considering 1970's cards fairly new because they weren't much older than I was. I thought of 1950's cards (especially issues like '55 Bowman, '55 Topps, '56 Topps) as "old" because of the coloring and size and how cool they were. But a 1973 Topps card? Probably not so much.

These days my children play sometimes with a bunch of my old leftover '86 Topps commons, and I don't know if they have any clue how old those cards are. They do know they aren't particularly valuable, LOL.

It's funny, I think the term 'vintage' is a moving target for most of us. When I was little in the summer of '73, my brother came home from his friend's house and showed us all of these crazy old cards he got. In hindsight they were 1966 Topps, as I always remember one of them was Tom Tresh, whose name I giggled at. In other words, these ancient relics of the past were only 7 years old!! We considered them sooooooooooooo frickin' old.

For me, I guess I go with around 1973-1975 and older as being vintage. It just saddens me that cards from the 80's are considered vintage in some circles. Yowza.

I would suggest that in 2090 - the mass produced stuff from 1990 will still be sitting around in warehouses and will still not be considered "vintage" by most collectors (if we still have any collectors by then).

For me "vintage" runs from 1945 thru 1980 (I just really like the 1980 Topps set). Prior to 1945 is in a category all it's own -"PreWar"

Prewar takes a special kind of collector - typically with higher budgets than most of us (in order to complete sets anyway)

This - series issue ended in 1973. After that more hobbyists and buying sets complete vs assembling

To the last part of your post: I was always a postwar (1950s and 1960s) baseball collector but got restless and gave prewar a try or two. It just isn't for me. Now, I am collecting 1960s football and having a blast! I still think postwar baseball is cool, too.

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+1

Yup - There you go

To me the modern era started with double knit uniforms, so pre-72ish or so.

I like the division on the board, pre war, post war , and post 1980. I hate the word vintage almost as much as the word poppage

I hear you but nothing is worse than poppage.

It's an interesting question, when I started collecting (and was aware of the organized hobby) was probably about 1980, and vintage was 1960. Do kids today think 1998 is vintage?

I guess it reminds me how much I've aged and how different this hobby to me than it was back then. Finding "old" cards back then was exotic, now you can get pretty much any Topps card throughout their history online.

I remember I met a kid who had 1970-71 cards, I gave up just about anything to get those exotic cards.

When my girls hear me talk about the 90s, they look at me like I am dead. It is all relative.

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I will concede you this point Jeff. I did say almost

A grape by any other name
 

Two different categories of neologisms, but I agree that vintage should only be applied to wines.:rolleyes:

I also hate it when I have to go to a dictionary to find out what someone here is talking about:)

I've always considered Ts all the way to Goudeys in their own individual category, and I've always though of 50s-75 as vintage. However, now that I'm only collecting "vintage" I am thinking that 50s-65 should be vintage. I know everything until 73 was in series. But commons from like 66-75 (the end of what I used to consider vintage) are next to worthless. You can get them for like 10 cents apiece nowadays.

Can you get common high number cards from 1966 and 1967 for 10 cents each?

No. I never said anywhere I could get high #s for that. I can get commons for that. High #s aren't considered commons, or at least I don't think they would be considered that.

They are common players. I find it odd your cutoff. I always found 1964 and 1965 much easier than 1966 and 1967. 1968-73 seemed even more plentiful. By the time you get to 1974, you can buy nice sets under 200.00 and I don't ever see much appreciation.

My bad, Al - I should have just opined that vintage had always been perfectly happy as just a noun and should never have been misappropriated for use as an adjective in our hobby.

Yes, I put together a 1974 Topps set in probably Ex to NM condition for the most part. After I completed it, I checked to see what I could get a set for in the same condition. They were selling for $90-$110. I spent $80 to get all the cards but 3 in 2 big lots. Then I traded for the Ryan, Winfield and Aaron. So, I spent $80 and a couple of months putting it together when I could've spent $15 more and just bought it outright.

After I saw the values, I decided to break it up because I thought it just wouldn't hold value over time. I've the stars put away (for now) and am trading all the other HOFers, commons, teams, rookies, whatever for late 1950s-early 1960s stuff. That's where I think I"m going to concentrate my collection on and not so much into the early 1970s.

You should compare this with other collecting hobbies.

In the coin collecting world, the Roman emperor Constantine produced a ton of debased coins of himself which survive to this day and you can buy them in bulk for a couple of bucks each.

They are kind of the coin collecting world's version of "junk wax". But they are 1700 years old.

So time is relative! 1700 years from now if our civilization still exists, 1988 Donruss cards still won't be considered vintage!

That one was easy :) If a year does not define it, what does ?

What defines it for coins ?

BTW -- The Garfield show is still going strong to this day.

I can picture Bob now --- yep in those days some people smoked IN the card show. Such a different world.

I probably saw you at some of those local Garfield shows when I would come up to visit

Rich

The hi #'s are pretty easy on a relative basis in 1965 and yes 64 is much easier than 66 or 67 Short Prints.

70 and 72 Hi #'s are more popular than 68, 69 or 71.

But to me, a hidden scarcity in filling the 65 sets are the 284-370 series, those are always harder than the hi #'s in that year

Rich

I think in my own mind, I always considered something vintage that came out before I started actively collecting! Stupid? Yeah, probably. But that's the way a kid looks at things I guess. So anything before 1974 was "vintage" for me growing up.

I go to the Garfield show occasionally, probably 4-6x a year. Still every other weekend. There used to be 2-3 shows just in North NJ every weekend (and each day of the weekend), now Garfield is pretty much alone. There are a couple over towards Edison too, and of course the White Plains show, a small NYC show and monthly LI shows. But that's pretty much it.

Part of me misses all the activity, but the other part likes that I can get the cards I couldn't afford then for less than they were 25-30 years ago.

Lol I know it’s still my favorite show. We probably did at least cross paths as I always attend that show. There was two other bobs is I remember. One that was under the stairs . The other was bob with the big beard that sold packs and boxes. I the the beard retired and I see him there from time to time. He was my absolute favorite person to buy Packs from and probably still is.

Vintage
 

The term should absolutely change as the years progress. 50 years from now, will you not call 88 donruss vintage?

1991 Topps was the last year of the soft, pulpy paper stock. So at some point, I believe this will be the accepted cut off year.

As for right now, I consider 85 and back to be vintage. 86 and forward is modern to me because of the drops in set value.