New member here! I collect N, T, E, non sport, trade cards

[trdcrdkid]

Hi, everybody! I guess this is the right forum to introduce ourselves? I've been collecting baseball cards since 1975 (age 9), collected the Topps set each year from 1977 to 1981 but gravitated toward older cards early. I got my first T206 (Pfeister holding bat, Polar Bear back) around 1980 from a neighbor kid, and my first Old Judge (Stemmeyer, hands at chest) at a card show in 1981 for $20. (I still have both of them.) I didn't have much money back then, but I started a nascent type card collection, of which the T206 and the Old Judge were prize specimens. I got a few more T206s, two of which were Lenox backs (though I didn't know at the time how rare they were) before drifting away from collecting in high school and college.

When I got back into collecting in the early 90s after a break, I was in grad school and still didn't have much money, but I at least had enough to start adding to my collection of pre-WWII cards, including my type collection of T and E cards. Sports Collectors Digest was great for that. I became interested in old hobby publications and bought a bunch of them from Dan Even, including a complete run of SCD from 1973 to 1991 and hundreds of other publications going back to the 1950s. From Don Steinbach of the Sport Collectors Store in Chicago, where I used to go as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s (RIP both Don and the store), I got a near-mint run of annual Beckett guides from 1979 through 1989, including a hardcover edition of the 1980 guide, of which only a few were printed.

I also got into non-sport N, T, and E cards and started a type collection of those, and eventually sets where they were affordable. In 1993 I got my first advertising trade card, a baseball-themed Merchant's Gargling Oil card that I got in a baseball card auction, and eventually trade cards became my main collecting focus -- I now have over 5,000 of them, focusing on patent medicine, soap, thread, sewing machines, stoves, shoes, corsets, Enterprise/Mrs. Potts, and miscellaneous other stuff. If any of you are into trade cards and would like to buy, sell, or trade, let me know.

But I never stopped collecting baseball cards, mostly but not exclusively N, T, and E cards plus miscellaneous types. (For a while I was also working on the 1967-75 Topps sets, of which I now have 1968, 1974, and 1975, but the others have been on the back burner for several years.) One thing that may make my collection somewhat unusual is that they're all raw -- I do not own any pre-war slabbed cards. They're all in toploaders or Card Saver II's, with some in plastic pages. I guess this is partly because there were no grading services when I started collecting, so I got used to having them raw, and being able to hold or touch them (very carefully, of course) if I wanted to; partly because ungraded cards tend to be cheaper; and partly because they're purely for my own enjoyment, and I'm mainly concerned with eye appeal rather than what some grading service thinks of a card. If I ever decided to sell any of them, I'd probably get at least some of them graded.

Anyway, here's some of what I have in terms of N, T, and E baseball cards:

About 40 Old Judges, some pretty nice, many with pinholes or other minor (to me) flaws but still good eye appeal, several trimmed, a few beaters;
One Gypsy Queen, with some minor paper loss but pretty good eye appeal;
Two N284s;
One N300, a real beater (Lovett);

158 T206s, including several duplicate fronts with different backs. These include 13 Hall of Famers and a decent collection of tougher backs, including five Carolina Brights and two Lenox; the only backs I need are Hindu red, Broadleaf 460, Drum, Uzit, and (of course) Ty Cobb. (Not including factory variants)

46 T205s, including seven minor leaguers;
29 T207s, including two Broadleaf backs, a Cycle, and a Napoleon;
12 T209s, 3 color and 9 B&W (a couple with paper loss, but mostly not bad);
65 T210s, most with creases and other problems but some nicer;
5 T211s;
53 T212s, including a few duplicates; many beaters but some pretty nice;
11 T213s (4 "Coupon" (Mild), 5 "20 for 5 cents", 2 "16 for 10 cts")
2 T215s
2 T216s (one a real beater of Tinker)

In early E cards, I have at least one example from every set from E90 through E106, except I don't have an E90-2, an E92 Croft's & Allen red, or an E104 with a Nadja back or "World's Champions" on the front. Both of my E103s are pretty rough, as is my E99, but I can't complain too much. From E120 on up, I have examples from most sets, but mostly just one of each, because I never really got into them. I have maybe two or three dozen Goudeys, Diamond Stars, Play Balls, and other 1930s gum cards, but haven't done much there in the last 15 years or so.

I hope this wasn't too long-winded, but I figure if there's ever a crowd that might be interested in all this, it's this crowd. I look forward to interacting with all of you and being a part of the community!

Dave Kathman
trdcrdkid (also my eBay username)