Slabs - Truly Protective or Harmful?

[trdcrdkid]

Believe it or not, this issue -- of cards being potentially damaged by clear materials meant to preserve them -- was being written about by Jefferson Burdick in the early 1940s. The first item below appeared in the October 1, 1941 issue of Card Collectors Bulletin, in which Aywon Exchange discusses the use of cellophane envelopes mounted on album pages to hold cards, and Burdick adds an editor's note recommending instead the use of Crystal Mounts, which were made for blocks of stamps. (I assume Burdick accidentally omitted a "not" when he wrote that they "are said to be injurious to paper and printing".) The second item below appeared in the next issue of CCB, dated December 1, 1941, and in it Burdick warns that ordinary cellophane can damage cards, but that cellulose acetate, which was used to make Crystal Mounts, is safe. The last item, which I previously showed in my post on James Colkitt and the auction of his collection, is from two issues later, the issue of April 1, 1942. It describes how Colkitt was using Crystal Mounts on scrapbook pages to mount his collection of 19th century tobacco cards; Burdick heartily approves, and I suspect that either he told Colkitt about this method, or Colkitt read about it in Burdick's CCB articles and decided to try it.

In any case, the idea of mounting collections of cards in an album, protected by a clear layer of protection, pretty much faded away after the 1940s, though it never totally went away. Plastic sheets made for baseball cards came on the market in the mid-1970s and immediately became very popular, but it turned out that the first generation of plastic pages contained PVC, which could damage cards over periods of many years. I remember around 1980 when this became widely known in the hobby, and everybody was scrambling to get plastic pages with "No PVC".