As a kid collecting baseball cards, I was interested in older, vintage cards early on, and one of my goals was to get at least one card from as many different sets as possible. In short, I was a type collector. This started at the age of 10 in 1976, when I sent away to a mail-order place I found in Baseball Digest, Hobby Card House, sending them $2.95 plus 25 cents postage for one card from each Topps set, 1952 through 1975. Over the next few years I got cards representing a bunch of other sets -- from older kids in the neighborhood; from the Sports Collector's Store on the southwest side of Chicago, where we went once or twice a year starting in 1977; from another mail-order dealer, Paul Marchant, whose 1979 price list I've posted (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=209650); and starting in 1980, from card shows, which were held a few times a year in the Chicago area.
In 1980, when I was 14 years old, I made a checklist of all the baseball card types I could find in my card reference works, in order to keep track of which types I had and which ones I needed. I organized it by American Card Catalogue classifications, which I included when I knew them. I still have this booklet, and I've scanned it below. When I got a new type, I would put an X by it in the list and update the numbers at the top of the section and on the cover of the book. I continued doing this for about a year, adding the new 1981 sets on a new page when they came out, and adding new sets when I became aware of them. If you look closely at the N card section on page 5, you can see where I erased a zero and put "1", after I got my first Old Judge at a card show at the Hillside Holiday Inn.
My interest in collecting gradually faded starting in 1982, but luckily I kept all my cards, so I had a good base to start with when I got back into the hobby in 1991. I was still interested in type collecting, and with a little more money in my pocket (and more access to card shows and Sports Collectors Digest), I was able to add examples from a lot more sets. I never returned to that original type checklist, though, so it remains a snapshot of one area of my collection as it was in 1981.
