Who will be the buyer of our vintage cards in 20 years?

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by bbeck

Back in 1976 I purchased my 1933 Goudey Babe Ruth with my dad at my side for $35 at the hotel Roosevelt in NYC. We could not believe we had spent that much on a card

Holy crap! In 1976 my father and I went to the ASCCA Thanksgiving show at the Roosevelt in NYC and I borrowed $25 above my savings to close on 1952 Topps and 1953 Topps Willie Mays cards. We also could not believe what we'd spent (and my mother was seriously ticked off at him for letting me do it). Talk about coincidences...And it turned out to be one of the best investments I have ever made. I sold the cards a few years later for 20x what I paid for them.

As far as 20 years from now, my responses are:

1. I plan to be around and actively collecting, so the cards will be just where they are now--gathering dust, like me.

2. If I happen to be gone, who cares? I will have had my fun and will not be in a position to do anything about it anyhow.

3. If the card market crashes to oblivion tomorrow I have still had a great time of it and will still collect--just with a lot more cards for the buck. Profit or losses are just numbers on an insurance valuation form if you do not plan to sell your cards. I don't. "Collecto ergo sum"--I collect therefore I am.

Scott, as far as boxing cards go (and I think I have a bit of cred on this issue), prices have declined over the last two years on all but the best stuff, which I love BTW, but I don't think we have reached the potential on the issues. Same with nonsports. Baseball cards have become the province of the really well off and wealthy. When I started out I could realistically promise myself that I could afford a Wagner some day. Now it is just a fantasy. The same is true of many other marquee vintage baseball cards. Boxing, I can still afford even the most expensive cards.

One other general observation on something that I think we often miss: fan bases for sports overlap with but are by no means congruent with collectors of cards from those sports. I know a lot of card collectors who do not follow the current versions of the sports in which they collect. I feel you either have the collecting bug or you don't. Case in point is one of my friends from the "outside" who is a huge sports fan but who could not care less about collecting anything from the sports he follows. He has a few pieces displayed in his rec room for atmosphere but that's it. He'd rather go to an insurance seminar than to a card convention and he thinks what we do is nuts. I haven't followed football since the Raiders left town and I haven't followed hockey since Gretzky retired but I collect cards from those sports from the 1960s and 1970s.