a question for the old time collectors

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Posted By: Mark Macrae

From my recollection, the first plastic sheets designed for baseball cards specifically were put out by K & M in Southern California during the early 70's (73/74?). They were side loading and designed for standard sized cards. K & M marketed them with a small binder that held about ten sheets. The binder had logos of the Major League Baseball teams all over it. There was an order form included with the binder for additional sheets. I seem to recall that Toys R Us sold them. Prior to that , I used plastic pages designed for photographs that were sold at drugstores (still have a few of the binders and original pages). A few years later a collector named Lebo designed a 'sheet' for the larger sized cards (56 Topps), but it was designed to hold several dozen cards and hang on a wall (somewhere in the archives I probably still have one or two of those... ) The other option available for collectors in the 60's / 70's was the clear plastic peel back pages with lines of adhesive on thick paper. A lot of good cards were stained or damaged using this method of storage. The other methods of storage began entering the marketplace in quantity during the middle 80's.