What was the salvation of the Prewar card hobby

[Exhibitman]

Why? My $0.02:

https://open.substack.com/pub/adamst...meOnShare=true

How? My $0.02:

I've been collecting for over 50 years with a brief detour for girls and cars (hint: cards are way easier to acquire and store) from about 1981-1987. The hobby was a backwater of hardcore devotees who did most stuff by mail or in local card clubs until the 1970s. The wave of nostalgia unleashed in the 1970s for the 1950s led to the expansion of awareness, with The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris starting the wave in 1973. My uncle loved the book and gave me a copy, which unleashed my interest in vintage cards. That book is a must-have for anyone who loves cards but it is really about the time and the sport as expressed in cards, not about the hobby. If you want a picture-perfect encapsulation of the hobby mid-1970s, get a copy of The Complete Book of Baseball Cards: For the Collector, Flipper and Fan [1975; Steve Clark]. There is no better encapsulation of things.

Starting in the late 1970s, the local clubs expanded into larger conventions with major shows. Here is a PC from the first show I attended:



Similar shows started up regionally, including a semi-annual (Memorial Day and Labor Day) show in Anaheim CA that Mike Berkus organized and that morphed into the National in 1980.

I also think that Alan Rosen aka Mr. Mint had a lot to do with hyping the hobby in the 1980s. My $0.02 on Rosen:

https://open.substack.com/pub/adamst...eOnShare=false

Then came Upper Deck...Read Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child's Hobby Into a High-Stakes Billion-Dollar Business by Pete Williams. Since then it has been an arms race between manufacturers and this thing of ours, vintage, has benefitted and been driven by a continual influx of collectors who are tired of a tint spot of wear making or breaking a card and the roller coaster price swings.

Then, of course, we had the COVID wave that jacked both prices and awareness through the roof.

What I find most interesting is that dedicated collectors are taking joy now in mid-grade and lower-grade cards that they would have scoffed at a decade ago. A collector is a collector whether the card is worth a fortune or a fortune cookie. Yay FUGLY cards