[jsq]

to understand the answer to your question, some perspective below may help you.

i will just bang it out so please forgive grammer etc.

during the mid 1970's about 25 or 30 different groups of people travelled the country doing hotel buying trips. they took out ads in the local newspaper and said i am buying cards in your town, pre 1960 typically, come to xyz hotel on saturday and/or sunday and we will pay cash.

this was before any reasonable hobby card guide or price guide existed.

the hobby prior to this time period had experienced very slow but steady growth but still was extremely small relative to todays number of collectors. with the emergence of hobby papers such as trader speaks and sports collectors digest some information was finally emerging but pricing info was grudgingly shared, not until the beckett guides did good price info emerge to the masses.

as such many people with older cards did not place much value on them - even within the hobby. and this was correctly so at that time as the market was extremely thin. you could not move volume of quality older cards. there was very little cash in the hobby in 1974 and 1975.

in 1974 or 1975, i remember having fits moving a vg-ex set of 1941 play ball that i wanted $225 or $250 for and that was after a 2 day show in chicago (once a year show or twice a year - i don't recall when chicago area finally got 2 shows a year for its 7 million metro region). this was the only shows held in that metro of any consequence for the entire year at that time. other metros likewise had only 1 or two shows a year in 1974. finally a guy showed up near the end or after the show closed and said he would buy it and complained massively that his wife was going to chew his A** for spending so much at the show.

the volume of cards and the quality of cards that was acquired by these different buying hotel buying groups was truly of epic proportion. something few who were not part the buying groups could ever imagine. this is truly the catalyst of the hobby growth for many reasons including:

it finally gave sellers enough inventory for people to put more effort into the marketing of the hobby (and their now burgeoning inventory).

the local newspapers found this such an exotic idea that adults would purchase essentially kids toys and pay good cash to boot that it was a great story that ran in many papers. this in turn brought hundreds of thousands of collectors into the hobby with the knowledge that it was ok to collect childhood memories even if you were not a child. the newspapers often made fun of the collectors. it was quite difficult to collect cards as an adult, you were literally looked at as a bit "odd" and that is no exageration at the point in time. local media exposure covering these buying trips greatly increased the awareness of the hobby.

i could go on with lots of other catalysts this buying activity unleashed but let it be safe to say many of the pre 1960 cards in the hobby emanated from these hotel buying trips. they covered literally every state, canada, and venezuela. they provided the inventory for the majority of the original card stores.

one of my friends, mike, competed with me in these hotel buying trip ventures (he also lived in a town of 75,000 people and ran a weekly classified to buy cards in the local paper. for instance mike had about 50 mint (nm to mint ie psa 8,9,10 by todays grading) 1959 stan musials for instance because he kept the ones from his and his partners buying trips. stan was his childhood hero. think how many lesser grade musials were in the batches he handled. these 50 cards on these buying trips and classified ads (most came from the buying trips) came from the original owner or original owners families. the condition was all over the place as you can imagine but mike and this 1 hotel buying group did enough volume of purchases for mike to get about 50 nm-mt 59 musials. he had dibs on the musials but nonetheless this one guy from one buying group had this many at one time by 1976 or 1977. now extrapolate this back in time. the older stuff had lower volume available of couse but e, t, and r series cards from 1910 - 1941 were a lot more common showing up at these hotel buying trips then todays collectors would imagine. and the condition in some cases was factory new for all intents and purposes. the older the lesser condition in general of course.

one thing to understand is that virtually nobody cared about condition as we know it today. my friend mike was far and away the first person i ever met who cared about gloss, printer marks, and centering. everyone wanted nice clean cards and would always take the better centered better condition. condition was not a major concern. the key then was to fill the missing number and most never bothered to upgrade and since i personally knew numerous people with collections that would have been in the top 20 collections EVER assembled before big money moved into the hobby in the 1990's i know what was in those collections and handled their cards personally -literally handled. with my friend mike that included mint sets of topps bowmans, play balls and goudeys (no lajoie) not to mention lots of e and t stuff that ranged from ex to mt but mike did not have complete sets of all the major e and t sets like he did the r sets.

beer can collecting was getting far more press at that time and had the added benefit that people did not think you were "weird" as an adult collecting beer cans since it was macho. the thing that stunted and essentially kept beer can collecting a small hobby is that unlike bb cards no giant hordes ever continually turned up. no hotel buying trips turned up anything if hotel buying trips even ever occured with beer cans. thus their was no incentive for the hobby to grow into the volume like it did with bb cards. no inventory = no business/hobby.

beer can collecting started later then bb card collecting yet it had 10 times the number of collectors by 1975? by 1975 beer can collecting had 6 or 7 major publishing books in full color whereas the bb card hobby had sortof 1. the beer can collecting hobby dwarfed the bb card hobby in terms of adult participants.

it is a good perspective to understand why the beer can collecting hobby died in infancy and why the bb card hobby skyrocketed. understand the hotel buying trips and what it unleashed and you will know a lot about the bb card hobby.

understanding the volume and QUALITY of cards turned up AND SAVED for the future of the hobby by these pioneers in the bb card collecting field is a key to understanding the sudden growth of the hobby starting in 1976 and moving forward and likewise the volume of cards led to the emergence of the price guide which took the hobby to another level.

no hotel buying trips = no excess inventory,
no influx of inventory = far fewer cards for collectors to collect
no hotel buying trips = no emergence of price guides for mass consumption
no hotel buying trips = no mass media exposure
no hotel buying trips = a whole lot of todays cards would have ended up in the trash heap.
no hotel buying trips = well you are starting to grasp the importance of the hotel buying trips and the vision the early hobby pioneers had which provided the catalyst for the emergence of this fun hobby.

you can make a good case that the catalyst for the entire bb card hobby was the hotel buying trips. without the hotel buying trips very few of the collectors of today would be in this hobby.

do lots of cards exist today that are truly mint or nm condition that were never touched or tampered with by card doctors? the answer is definately yes - i saw them and handled them in the 1973 - 1978 era.

their were a surprising number of kids who took care of their cards and just assembled number runs, or sets, if they had enough cash and then put the cards in a box where they sat for 15, 30, and many more years. i saw stuff walk in the door that would knock your sox off.

also if you hung out with the biggest of the big collectors of the 1974 era many would tell you not to touch anything after 1965 because they made to much of it and their would never be enough collectors to ever buy the stuff from the 65 and more recent period. the hobby growth just was not existing and some card sellers in the back of sporting news and bb card digest were pumping out sets every year to fill all the demand so who would their be to sell the 1965 and more recent cards to in the future? this was VERY logical based on their experience with the GLACIAL growth of the hobby in the 1950's and 60's. few entered the hobby because they did not know how to contact each other and due to social stigma. you did not brag about collecting to your co-worker, beer drinking buddies, team members, or fellow church members as they would think you quite weird. you could not move volume of older cards for cash, their was so little cash in the hobby. you could trade but before the hotel buying trips few people had much in the way of duplicates to trade. as such the hobby was kinda stuck before the hordes of cards were unleashed by the hotel buying trips.

i sold all of my cards by 1978 or so and life worked out quite well. it was a springboard in many ways, a heck of a LOT of fun, and a real education in economics, marketing, and business which all served me extremely well in the future.

hope this helps round out some perspective regarding your question:

do cards of today exist which were never tampered with?
the answer is unequivocally YES, lots of mt condition cards were saved from the scrap heap due to the hotel buying groups rescuing them in 1975 and 1976.

life is very good,

jsq