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Posted By: Paul

Hager's book had by far the highest quality photographs of cards of any price guide. It also had a very interesting innovation that I wish Krause would adopt. He made an effort to judge the relative scarcity of cards from each set. For example, Just So cards and Four Base Hits cards were ranked in the scarcest category, George C. Miller cards were placed in a less scarce category, Goudeys were placed in a fairly common category, and modern Topps cards were placed in an extremely common category.

However, the book had two big problems. First, the prices were, to put it charitably, ahead of their time. In some cases, prices were 4 times reality, maybe even 10 times. There was speculation that this was done to enhance the value of the author's own inventory. I haven't looked at the book lately, but some of the values may now be accurate.

Second, the book was dripping with the author's efforts to toot his own horn. For each set, the author included a comment about how many cards from the set he had "handled." He never provided a definition of "handled," but it seemed unlikely that he had been in the same room with as many Just So's, Four Base Hits, etc., as he said.

If it was cheap, I'd buy it just for the pictures.