Posted By:
Gilbert MainesIn the 60s (no, it was the early 70s), as I recall it, there was no organization to the hobby at all. You would find sellers set up at antique auto club shows trying to sell packs of mixed '52 - '56 topps containing about 200 vg/ex cards for $5. And taking all day to sell a few packs of those.
Edited to add: Although tempted, I was not among the foolhardy who purchased a pack of those. Five dollars seemed too big to me, I guess. Perhaps the first in a continuing series of less than optimum choices I have made in this hobby.
By the middle of the '70s sellers were able to sell sufficient material to justify opening a storefront and establishing their business. Here is where I saw the cards we collect. Mostly I did not know what I was looking at. But I had a Sports Collectors Bible and sufficient awareness to note shoe boxes of nice looking Playballs, Topps, Goudeys and t206s piled four feet high.
You would think that in this type of arena a person with a little capital, a lot of vision and a bit of smarts, could become a Lew Lipsett.
In '79 Beckett began to bring cohesion to the baseball card circus by publishing their first widely distributed guide. A series of these publications shows the expansion of checklists, followed by their contraction to accomodate the new card listings, while maintaining guide size. So much potential information was lost to accomodate the interest in '70s & '80s material.