What was the salvation of the Prewar card hobby

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It's not as though vintage cards were considered worthless junk right up to the creation of the internet. The "worthless junk" perception era ended by the late Sixties, and cards of all sorts were barreling up in price by the late Seventies, The end of the Topps monopoly in 1981 supercharged everyone's awareness of the hobby, and that's where the prices began to rise. If you're asking about the mechanisms of collecting before the internet, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Sports Collectors Digest, which absolutely dominated the hobby from the late Seventies to the mid-Nineties. Every week saw a huge publication, hundreds of pages long, featuring auctions and sales of all sorts of material, much of it vintage. Smaller collectors could place ads in the classified section for very little cost. SCD was absolutely the center of the hobby for about 20 years, even more so than ebay is today.