Why Don’t We Have a Vintage Card Society?
 

Stamps have the APS (American Philatelic Society), coins have the ANA (American Numismatic Association), but vintage sports cards—despite being a multi-billion dollar industry—lack a central, non-profit, member-driven organization that functions like a society. Are there efforts underway to create such an organization? To me, the closest group to this concept is Net54.


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The hobby needs something like this very badly. Right now, it's like the wild west. We need some kind of governing body that can help us fight fraud and lead people in the right direction.

The Cartophilic Society has been around for decades, based in Britain it is a world-wide organization, though not really many US participants.

Good luck getting a consensus on important stuff!

Also, funding this organization could be fun, unless you’ve got someone in mind to pay the bills.

In the mid '80's I belonged to a group like that
They really didn't do much.

Ironically I was looking through some "The Trader Speaks" the other day
& saw an ad from famed collector Barry Halper trying to head this type of organization.
The ad was from the April 1977 edition

https://www.qualitycards.com/pictures/barryhalper.jpg

Wow, the ad is ironic. Nothing is new. It appears the value of the card market has grown exponentially since 1977, but no movement on creating a structure for the hobby.
I realize we have hobby fragmentation. Unlike stamps or coins, card collecting exploded with private grading firms and for-profit shows, making it commercial-first rather than scholarship-first. PSA, Beckett, SGC, and auction houses fill some “society-like” roles—but their goal is profit, not preservation or education.


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Love of the Game Auctions and Al Crisafulli do, to me, function as a hobby proponent. Their business model appears to have hobby support as, at least, an ancillary component. Maybe REA also.


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To be Blunt:

Everyone is out for themselves in this business and until we understand that as a group we're more powerful than individuals we will never get anywhere

Also, we have so many disparate interests that new people (the stores with what they need to do) can't always mix with show dealers who can't mix with internet/on-line dealers etc. We truly do need a Card Dealer Association but until people understand that they can't always do what they want, this will never occur

Rich

+1 with you sir, every word. Rather than a for-profit auction house, until such an organization comes into being, this forum is our agent. Say what you will, the hobby expertise is clearly right here on net54.

Are any of the people proposing this (and this comes up every so often) willing to do the work that would be involved? Fund it? Get funding?

I am willing to do all of the legal work creating a nonprofit corporation, paying the fees for incorporation, and so forth. I also would be willing to do other work on the project. That would be relatively easy. But I realize the key would be bringing in a strong, diverse group of hobbyists to make anything meaningful happen, and there I am lacking in contacts and experience.


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I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.

A very generous offer Jeffery, this is the kind of project that would truly take a village.

What exactly do the APS and ANA do for their respective hobbies?

I'm not sure why this vintage hobby group just doesn't align with SABR. They already have a robust membership, they already have the research and publishing arm, and they are a respected, well recognized non-profit within our community. Asking them to create a branch within their organization would be better than starting something from the ground up.

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This has been tried a few times and always fails. SABR is a research-oriented organization and has its advantages but who is going to pay annual dues just to join if not already a member?

Almost No one.

Plus, they still let one of the biggest criminals ever in the hobby, Peter Nash, be part of their organization. As long as the current owner is running Net54baseball, we will have very little to do with them.

https://peternashpublicdocuments.com/


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Good question. APS and ANA provide education, publications, authentication resources, annual conventions, and support for local clubs. They also help preserve the history of their hobbies and advocate for collectors. A vintage card society could offer similar benefits—essentially building on what Net54 already fosters, but with more structure, resources, and long-term support.

Leon:

To be honest, SABR does not do background checks on any prospective members so don't blame them for not checking everyone or anyone. Just like is Mr. Nash bought a VIP pass to the NSCC the odds are they would accept him attending as well.

Rich

Many of "them" are on this forum, including very senior people there. They know about him. I am not angry or upset, or anything, just don't care to associate with those that associate with him. If other collectors love him, more power to them.
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As I said above, we already have a vintage card society, it's called net54baseball.com

We have all the experts in the hobby right here. We have someone of integrity and character running it. It doesn't cost us anything to join. There are no membership fees for us. I can only imagine what it costs Leon to keep it running.

There is no entity anywhere more devoted to vintage cards.

SABR is very much worth the investment. You not only support the research they are doing but you also get some cool perks like free ebooks and access to some fascinating research.

SABR also has a baseball card group...I've done a couple of blogs for them.

I would love to see the group sponsor a vintage card show.

In keeping with NSCC tradition established over the last decade, I propose when this new group is formed, that it never meet anywhere but Cleveland, Chicago, or Atlantic City. :rolleyes:

Probably because it's not 1953 anymore and most collectors today couldn't give two shits what some random group of 5 guys thinks about anything having to do with the hobby. If you want a governing body, there are plenty of cults you could join.

To Frosty’s point, the other challenge will be getting anyone to pay attention, or care.

You would need to have better policing and punishing of violators, and that would be a challenge unless everyone bought into your standards and policies.

As our history has taught us, our standards are usually flexible if the inducement is sufficiently remunerative.

LOL literally. Tell it like it is.

I'm a SABR member, and just checked the SABR directory. The only Nash that is a member of SABR is a Robert Nash from Nebraska - Peter Nash is apparently not a member anymore.

I wouldn't claim that SABR is perfect - no organization is - but it has a lot of great members and I appreciate all it's done.

Maybe we should all join!

;)

Good to know, Groucho.

That is great to hear. It's not only that he was a member, they had held him in high acclaim, from what I remember. And no doubt, Peter Nash is very knowledgeable about the history of baseball. Kind of like Bank Burglers studying diagrams of banks. I am sure some of them are experts at bank architecture.

This sort of goes with the theme of the thread.

A Vintage Card Society? Where do I pay my Home Owners Association fees, sorry - I meant Vintage Card Society fees.

A big negative for me.

I have always thought that if membership on the forum were $1 a year, the membership would go down substantially. People, including me, don't want to pay for stuff!

And a baseball ticket to an Annual Ball, from 1867....quite early and ornate..

https://luckeycards.com/ticket1867b.jpg

Or to paraphase Groucho Marx, you could joint a club and hit someone over the head with it.

Marxism at its finest.

Phil aka Tere1071

While I applaud the idea in general, I wonder what it could do to fight all the fraudulent practices in the marketplace. They won't be empowered, like the SEC, to go after the guys wearing black hats. They can't stop the alterers, the counterfeiters or the grading companies models. Now, if they had some legal authority that would be different.

And that is why net54 is already our society. All the experts are here. One way or another, it all comes to light here, good or bad. Far more on the spot than any pay-dues could ever be, and you are already a member.

The APS provides a wide variety of services.
A monthly publication giving hobby news and dealer ads.
Authentication services based on experts and a huge reference collection.
A sales department that has both online sales and books of stamps for sale that circulate to members interested in a particular subject.
Educational opportunities - videos, seminars etc.
A very large Philatelic library and archive.
Things to promote the hobby, like supporting local clubs.

They're also a reference for finding specialist organizations. Some of them are very useful. Im a member of the US philatelic classics society, Former member of the Precancels group and perfins group and APS. My wife was in a Christmas philatelic organization, a couple Canadian groups and a topical group. All have varying levels of things they support.

I have not been a member of the ANA, but did collect coins for years, and as far as I know they did or do the same things.

The philatelic group I'm in has about 900 members, including many of the major dealers. They publish a quarterly magazine in color covering a broad range of topics in detail.

Very little of what they publish besides ads has anything to do with the business end of the hobby.

Perhaps there's a troll club you can join if you already haven't?

Just my take on our hobby having a national level organization, and perhaps why we don't.

Both the APS and ANA were formed a long long time ago. When access to information was much more difficult than it is today.
Oddly, at least the stamp hobby was similar to cards today, and on a global scale. The "shenanigans" that went on..... mostly legal but sketchy.

There were hundreds of small hobby news magazines, usually run by dealers and often with sharp opinions about other dealers and not long lasting.
There was a real need for an organization to keep track of information about the hobby. What issues were "real" and which were speculative labels, or worse, real issues with a speculator behind them.*
The profit motive was not what it is today, with many of the richest collectors. Their outlook was similar to the view of professional sports, that demanding money for a pastime was somewhat unseemly and ignoble (Not that they didn't profit or pay high prices for rarities. )
Various functions were added along the way.

And yes, back then censure by some hobby organization for doing sketchy stuff carried some weight. (I likely wouldn't today, a good deal of sketchy stuff is done by APS dealer members, but nothing really comes of it)

I've said for years that ours is a Peter Pan hobby that never grew up.
We have a solid base for that growth here, with some members doing some really good research on many sets and from many different angles.
We also have hobbyists that have little or no interest in the minutia.
And that's a solid basis for a healthy hobby. We NEED both sorts of collectors.

We also need some central mechanism to preserve, organize and promote the vintage card aspect of the hobby and the information we have collectively generated since , well, since there have been cards.
A number of sources, here, websites, information from dealers, etc.
But the question becomes how survivable is that information? Old cardboard hopefully will be around a long time. The same for the T206 and T205 web pages, but we've seen one of those be nearly lost within the last few years.
Most of those pages won't survive much past their owner.
If Leon decided to shut the board down tomorrow, either because of money or just getting tired of out shit...(Hi Leon, please don't!) whatever is here would likely be gone very quickly. Another example
I had three sources of great scans for T206s to look for minor details.

Library of Congress - Great scans, painful organization. They're a library/archive and just don't organize resources the way we do. Hopefully those will stay up, but that becomes less certain daily.

The Burdick Collection at the MET. - Used to have great scans for most. Really great for commons, only smaller lower resolution for HOFers. Now it's small low res for everything. Probably an issue around NYs name image likeness laws that go well beyond copyright.

A collection at a college that I can't find anymore. Good scans with good organization.

Some auction houses have great scans, but you have to sign up.

So even stable institutions can' be relied on. A group that represented collectors could probably lobby the MET to purchase or license the high res digital copies of the cards from the Burdick collection, and preserve that in a second location.

But, we can see from discussions here just how fractured out hobby is, what's OK, what's not ok. What exactly is a rookie card, or for that matter what's even a card. The definitions of those were "simple" before the early -mid 90's, but those simple definitions we mostly got from Beckett broke down as the draft pick sets and national team subsets became common things. and broke even more when companies issued cards that were 8x10 so more like cabinet cards or premiums, but issued in packs

We could promote the vintage parts of the hobby by having displays, maybe even competetive ones, but that would require some infrastructure and floor space and security at a show, for likely little immediate return.

We NEED an organization to promote different aspects of the hobby, and to create a hobby collective memory that will outlive us. But I believe we will never have that.


*One guy would approach newly forming governments in South America, convince them that stamps would add to their legitimacy and sell them on having a set of 20 different printed often for face values that had nearly no postal function. The country would pay for millions of each, and he would use part of his profits to buy additional sets from the printer, selling for over face value despite costing pennies per thousand. Prices of most south American stamps are still depressed well over a century later

Well said, Steve. I have long felt that an online repository of comprehensive informantion relative to all sports and non-sports cards, perhaps something similar to Wikipedia, that is available to collectors for free or for a relatively small fee may be the single greatest need of card collectors. I feel that what Old Cardboard has created is a good start but far from what I envision, but I sense that OC has become much less active in recent years.

Well said Steve! I agree with your thoughtful analysis.


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If we could scrape this site of information it would be more than anywhere else for pre-war cards. Small issue is, it would have to be done manually. Maybe in the future AI can do it ;).