Talking about American Card Catalogs

[Leon]

The history of the hobby is interesting and many of us addicted card collectors enjoy knowing where it all started. Some of the earliest printed materials concerning the hobby are the Card Collectors Bulletins which have been posted recently and will continue to be posted for many more weeks. One of the other neat things, which can be collected, are the American Card Catalogs themselves, which is where most of our numbering system that we use today came from. There are a few other places some of the numbers came from, but by and large, they are from the ACC (American Card Catalog). As we know, Mr. Burdick authored the first catalog and it was named The United States Card Collectors Catalog, published June 1, 1939, for the hefty sum of 50 cents. Before that, some cards were listed in the Card Collectors Bulletins and were organized in that fashion. The numbering in the 1939 catalog was completely different than what any future editions would have. Mr.Burdick changed it in the subsequent editions, from that first edition, to try to simplify it. I don't want to go too deep into the ACC's in this thread as there is enough material to write a chapter, or even a short book, on the subject. Suffice it to say that the catalog was updated every 7 yrs and had revised editions put out in 1946, 1953, 1960. The last one was by Richard Gelman put out in 1967 and was said to be an exact copy of the 1960 edition. There have been subsequent reprints of many of the editions but the last, non-reprint one was 1960. For that reason we should generally use that latest edition when talking about the numbering. The 1939's are very scarce.....best regards