Why Don’t We Have a Vintage Card Society?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Snowman

Probably because it's not 1953 anymore and most collectors today couldn't give two shits what some random group of 5 guys thinks about anything having to do with the hobby. If you want a governing body, there are plenty of cults you could join.

The philatelic group I'm in has about 900 members, including many of the major dealers. They publish a quarterly magazine in color covering a broad range of topics in detail.

Very little of what they publish besides ads has anything to do with the business end of the hobby.

Perhaps there's a troll club you can join if you already haven't?

[steve B]

Just my take on our hobby having a national level organization, and perhaps why we don't.

Both the APS and ANA were formed a long long time ago. When access to information was much more difficult than it is today.
Oddly, at least the stamp hobby was similar to cards today, and on a global scale. The "shenanigans" that went on..... mostly legal but sketchy.

There were hundreds of small hobby news magazines, usually run by dealers and often with sharp opinions about other dealers and not long lasting.
There was a real need for an organization to keep track of information about the hobby. What issues were "real" and which were speculative labels, or worse, real issues with a speculator behind them.*
The profit motive was not what it is today, with many of the richest collectors. Their outlook was similar to the view of professional sports, that demanding money for a pastime was somewhat unseemly and ignoble (Not that they didn't profit or pay high prices for rarities. )
Various functions were added along the way.

And yes, back then censure by some hobby organization for doing sketchy stuff carried some weight. (I likely wouldn't today, a good deal of sketchy stuff is done by APS dealer members, but nothing really comes of it)

I've said for years that ours is a Peter Pan hobby that never grew up.
We have a solid base for that growth here, with some members doing some really good research on many sets and from many different angles.
We also have hobbyists that have little or no interest in the minutia.
And that's a solid basis for a healthy hobby. We NEED both sorts of collectors.

We also need some central mechanism to preserve, organize and promote the vintage card aspect of the hobby and the information we have collectively generated since , well, since there have been cards.
A number of sources, here, websites, information from dealers, etc.
But the question becomes how survivable is that information? Old cardboard hopefully will be around a long time. The same for the T206 and T205 web pages, but we've seen one of those be nearly lost within the last few years.
Most of those pages won't survive much past their owner.
If Leon decided to shut the board down tomorrow, either because of money or just getting tired of out shit...(Hi Leon, please don't!) whatever is here would likely be gone very quickly. Another example
I had three sources of great scans for T206s to look for minor details.

Library of Congress - Great scans, painful organization. They're a library/archive and just don't organize resources the way we do. Hopefully those will stay up, but that becomes less certain daily.

The Burdick Collection at the MET. - Used to have great scans for most. Really great for commons, only smaller lower resolution for HOFers. Now it's small low res for everything. Probably an issue around NYs name image likeness laws that go well beyond copyright.

A collection at a college that I can't find anymore. Good scans with good organization.

Some auction houses have great scans, but you have to sign up.

So even stable institutions can' be relied on. A group that represented collectors could probably lobby the MET to purchase or license the high res digital copies of the cards from the Burdick collection, and preserve that in a second location.

But, we can see from discussions here just how fractured out hobby is, what's OK, what's not ok. What exactly is a rookie card, or for that matter what's even a card. The definitions of those were "simple" before the early -mid 90's, but those simple definitions we mostly got from Beckett broke down as the draft pick sets and national team subsets became common things. and broke even more when companies issued cards that were 8x10 so more like cabinet cards or premiums, but issued in packs

We could promote the vintage parts of the hobby by having displays, maybe even competetive ones, but that would require some infrastructure and floor space and security at a show, for likely little immediate return.

We NEED an organization to promote different aspects of the hobby, and to create a hobby collective memory that will outlive us. But I believe we will never have that.


*One guy would approach newly forming governments in South America, convince them that stamps would add to their legitimacy and sell them on having a set of 20 different printed often for face values that had nearly no postal function. The country would pay for millions of each, and he would use part of his profits to buy additional sets from the printer, selling for over face value despite costing pennies per thousand. Prices of most south American stamps are still depressed well over a century later

[ValKehl]

Well said, Steve. I have long felt that an online repository of comprehensive informantion relative to all sports and non-sports cards, perhaps something similar to Wikipedia, that is available to collectors for free or for a relatively small fee may be the single greatest need of card collectors. I feel that what Old Cardboard has created is a good start but far from what I envision, but I sense that OC has become much less active in recent years.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by ValKehl

Well said, Steve. I have long felt that an online repository of comprehensive informantion relative to all sports and non-sports cards, perhaps something similar to Wikipedia, that is available to collectors for free or for a relatively small fee may be the single greatest need of card collectors. I feel that what Old Cardboard has created is a good start but far from what I envision, but I sense that OC has become much less active in recent years.

If we could scrape this site of information it would be more than anywhere else for pre-war cards. Small issue is, it would have to be done manually. Maybe in the future AI can do it .