Adam, thanks for chiming in. I last checked on this thread early yesterday and felt I would have to say something if you didn't.
And by the way, that Julie Newmar card is a short and convincing response to the question of why life is worth living...
On a less philosophical note, I wrote an article on exhibits for Frank Barning's Baseball Hobby News about forty years ago, and collectors were having precisely the same debate then. Size may be part of the issue (but, as has already been pointed out, where does that leave Turkey Reds?), but the real problem lies in the lack of a good checklist. The 1947-1966 list found in modern price guides is little more than an information dump. Collectors are uneasy if they can't precisely figure out the year of a card, or how many are left in order to complete the set.
Elwood Scharf chronicled the postwar Exhibit baseball set in the pages of The Trader Speaks in the late Seventies, and I would have thought that his observations would have been picked up by the price guides. But they haven't been. Adam, you've done your part, but the understanding of this series just hasn't hit the mainstream. And yes, the fact that a popular player like Williams or DiMaggio was reissued for years does dampen some people's enthusiasm. But that's the reality; there's nothing we can do about that.
I got enthused about Exhibits in the late 1970's when they could be had at card shows for twenty five cents in mint condition, Hall of Famers for fifty cents, and Mantle/DiMaggio/Williams for a buck each. Now that's incentive!
It really comes down to how willing you are to collect blind. Me, I also collect the Exhibit movie star issues of the 1910's to the 1960's. There are so many cards, known and unknown, that it makes my brain hurt. A checklist? Are you kidding?
