Changes at Krause (F&W)

[toppcat]

TS was a large part of the magazine-this is going to be an interesting transition. I just hit my 30th year as a subscriber and while they have been sparse, there are still some good stories and tidbits in SCD. I thought they should have gone back to biweekly a long time ago. I hope this does not mean my other F&W Subscription (Goldmine) is about to enter uncharted territory as well.

[Rich Klein]

Which is always dangerous, but I did post that I suspected because of the early deadlines that both baseball annual volumes are not affected for their 2011 calendar release.

I am concerned about the 2012 releases though

Rich

[Bob Lemke]

Rich,

Actually, the smaller annual Baseball Card Price Guide (modern stuff) HAS been killed.

The pre-press work on a catalog is cheap compared to the cost of putting the ink on paper. Evidently projected sales weren't there for that title.

[Rich Klein]

So what we know for calendar year 2011 is that there will be for the first time in years NO "modern" baseball card price book and there will be a Standard Catalog again this year but we're not sure how modern prices will be updated for any future tomes.

I appreciate the clarifications

Rich

[Exhibitman]

If you really think about it, there is no need for a price guide on modern stuff. Except for the signed and relic stuff, the values should always be the same: squat and diddley-squat. Just take MSRP for a pack, knock it down 90%, divide by the number of cards, and you have a pretty accurate price point for nearly anything made after 1989.

[FrankWakefield]

In agreement with Exhibitman... but one utility of The Standard Catalog is the listing of modern stuff. It isn't the associated pricing, but the listing itself that is useful. I bought some of those Topps Cracker Jacks when they first came out, was it 6 years ago? And I wanted to see them all listed in a catalog. Not for the pricing, but to see who was in the set, who wasn't, and what variations existed.

Again, The Standard Catalog is a fantastic tool for the vintage collector. Let's hope someone figures out a way to keep it viable.

[Rich Klein]

and I hate to say it on THIS board -- but the modern listings are as important if not more so than the vintage listings.

Because for so many collectors, the way we draw them into vintage cards is for them to start as new card collectors as that is still much more accessible and then they can come back into our world.

And any resource that is now taken away which covers those modern cards is a real shame. The price point for the modern card yearly price guide was much cheaper than the Standard Catalog and thus again made that book more accessible to collectors.

I'm not crunching the numbers like the folks at F&W but I suspect they will determine by next year not producing the "modern" tome was a mistake. In addition, the modern tome was needed last year because the post-2000 cards were put onto a CD Disk and not part of the book.

All of this is an unintended consequence of the overproduction of number of products issued in some of the middle years of 2003-2005. We had over 90 mainstream products issued in 2004 and thus who knows how much space had to be used for those products which still have a lasting effect today.

Regards
Rich