1979 vintage card price list

[trdcrdkid]

Originally Posted by darwinbulldog

First time I've seen "VG-Mt" condition. We're other people using that designation back then?

I don't know about that specific designation, but people didn't care nearly as much about condition, and grading was very subjective and slipshod by today's standards. There wasn't that much difference in value between a VG card and a Mint card (though "Mint" by 1979 standards would encompass anything from a PSA 6 to 10), so it wasn't that big a deal. When card prices rose rapidly in the 80s and some people started paying more of a premium for high-grade cards, the lax grading standards became a problem, and the TPGs came onto the scene in the 90s to address that problem.

[Luke]

$30 for the e95 Cobb must have seemed like a fortune back then. Also, it would have kind of sucked if you paid $4 for HOFer Delehanty in the t206 set, and then received Jim. And wished you'd spent $3.50 on Mordecai Brown instead

[KCRfan1]

I remember those prices......ugh.

[trdcrdkid]

$30 was a lot of money for me in 1979, requiring months of saving. I had started babysitting my younger brothers and sisters for $1 an hour by then, which gave me some extra scratch, but some of that money went to buying packs of current Topps cards, since I collected the set every year. Once a year for my birthday we would go to Pat Quinn and Don Steinbach's Sports Collectors Store in Chicago, and I went to my first card show in 1980. I seem to recall bringing no more than $30 or $40 on such outings, maybe less sometimes. I would never have spent $30 on a single card, but in 1981 I did spend $10 for my first Old Judge at a card show.

[tjb1952tjb]

Thanks for posting............interesting.

[drcy]

I got my first Pre-War card, a 1933 Goudey Jack Quinn, as a random Goudey card from the Larry Frisch catalog about the same time.

[trdcrdkid]

Looking at the list again, I realize that I also bought a random Zeenut in P-F condition at the same time, for $2, so that I actually spent $5.25 plus $1 shipping. That card was a 1923 Zeenut of Chadbourne, which I also still have.

[stlcardsfan]

Funny, I went to school at Eastern IL Univ. in Charleston starting in 1985. Wish I would have run into this guy!