Supplies History - Toploaders?

[jchcollins]

Maybe a mundane subject, but does anyone know approx. when toploaders became a thing in the hobby? I was thinking early 1980's, but interestingly enough, the term at least was not a thing in 1985 issues of Krause's Baseball Cards Magazine. Plastic sheets and pages seemed to be all the rage back then.

I guess because patents only last for 20 years, this is also proving difficult to research on Google. I started collecting at age 9 in 1986 and only know that toploaders were around then, or at least very shortly thereafter.

Thanks for any info. I sometimes go down rabbit holes with related card subjects, yes even supplies. While Google has revealed a wealth of information on One Touches and even penny sleeves, similar information on toploaders has proved elusive to me so far. I did see on the Cardboard Gold website that Card Savers have supposedly been around since the were introduced at the 1987 National, for whatever that is worth...

[steve B]

I have a small collection of card collecting supplies.

What I haven't been good at is writing down about when they came out.

I think your recalling of them being an 86/87 thing is very close.
If I find some old magazines, I'll see if I can find ads.

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by steve B

I have a small collection of card collecting supplies.

What I haven't been good at is writing down about when they came out.

I think your recalling of them being an 86/87 thing is very close.
If I find some old magazines, I'll see if I can find ads.

I remember as a kid along about 1987 that toploaders were a thing, but don't remember them being labeled for sale in packs or anything. For example if you bought a somewhat expensive vintage card in a shop (I begged and eventually got my mom to buy me a nice '66 Koufax that year) - it would be in a toploader. No penny sleeves, those came later. Even more expensive cards would be in all manner of screw-down cases; there were a lot back then. As I mentioned, pages and binders were all the rage back then, and I think even if a kid was not a set collector - it was just assumed that you would buy pages and devise an order and make it work. I did thusly, as that's what all my friends were doing at the time.

I do see in some of these early BBCM magazines what look like "individual" card holders, some with stands and stuff like that - but even for the ones that don't have those, I'm thinking the pricing (75 cents per?) means that these were not toploaders as we know them today.

I am just looking for baseline information like the first patent. I wonder if that was UltraPro (who seems to make most of them today...) or someone else?

[BioCRN]

I've casually wondered for years about card storage in the 1950s+ since my exposure to the hobby came in the early 80s.

I don't remember when toploaders/penny sleeves became common or even highly used storage in my area, but I remember 9-card sheets in binders being a thing.

I do wonder about stuff that happened before I was old enough to pay attention. You don't see many cards being glued into albums with 1950s+ cards, unlike decades earler. They can't all have been just thrown into a box or similar...maybe.

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by BioCRN

They can't all have been just thrown into a box or similar...maybe.

I'm guessing the vast majority of 1950's and 60's collections that survived in decent shape were in boxes of some kind at some time. I always used shoeboxes as a kid for the most inexpensive common cards, even into the late 1980's and early 90's. As a result, I still have some of them that my childhood shoes came in, even though the shoes themselves are now long gone, lol. Plastic pages and albums / binders predated toploaders from all I can tell, but even these were not available until sometime in the mid-1970's.

Though I just assumed it was earlier, I'm guessing from what I have seen today that "toploaders" as we know them now were kind of a mid-to-late 1980's advent. In hobby publication ads I have from 1985, you don't see toploaders. By 1989, you do.

[Lucas00]

Here's some NOS products I have. Probably not that old but still cool.

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by Lucas00

Here's some NOS products I have. Probably not that old but still cool.

Very cool. I can't say I remember the original packaging well (though it does look familiar...) but I definitely remember those screw and snap cases. Late 80's / early 90's.

[AustinMike]

Cigar boxes and shoe boxes were popular when I was growing up. As well as rubber bands.

Another popular storage area was pinning to the spokes of bicycle tires.