Hobby history: The 1939 United States Card Collectors Catalog

[trdcrdkid]

Lately I've been posting a lot of material that Jefferson Burdick wrote in the early years of Card Collector's Bulletin, which he founded in 1937 as the first periodical devoted to card collecting. After writing several articles about card collecting in Hobbies magazine in 1935 and 1936, Burdick typed up the first issue of Card Collector's Bulletin in January 1937 -- a single sheet, mimeographed on both sides -- and sent it out to 55 people who had written to him about his Hobbies articles. He wrote up three more issues in the next three months (February through April 1937), summarizing what he then knew about the card sets that were out there. He then wrote up four more issues from March to November 1938, sending them to a slowly growing subscriber base, and in the last one he expressed his hope "that a permanent ‘United States Card Collectors Catalog’ may be printed at some future time incorporating a new pricing system and furnishing much additional information about the sets".

Burdick spent most of the first half of 1939 putting together just such a catalog, then having it professionally typeset and printed (in a run of 500 copies). He published it on June 1, 1939 as "The United States Card Collectors Catalog", or "The U.S. Card Collectors Catalog", as it was on the title page. This was the first edition of what became The American Card Catalog, where such designations as T206 and E90-1 originated. This first version was in looseleaf format, with three holes punched in the left margin, so that it could be kept together in a binder and supplements could be added as needed. George Vrechek wrote about the 1939 U.S. Card Collectors Catalog in Sports Collector's Digest in 2012, based on his examination of Leon's copy. That article is available here: http://www.oldbaseball.com/refs/US_C...talog_1939.pdf

I also now have a copy, won in the recent REA auction along with issues 1-30 of Card Collector's Bulletin, and so I thought I would scan and post the most important parts of it, to go with all the other early Burdick material I've been posting. It has 80 pages of text, printed on only one side of the page, followed by several blank pages (which apparently contain advertising in other copies), plus supplements from 1940, 1941, and 1942.

The first two scans below are of the cover and the title page, the latter of which shows the screw thingies used to bind the volume and keep the cover attached. Next comes a page showing the sizes of different cards, an index, and a very interesting six-page guide to collecting cards in 1939. Then comes the intro to the section on 19th-century tobacco cards and related things (albums, etc.), and two pages from that section -- the first page, with the Allen & Ginter small cards (including what we know as N28 and N29, here #32 and #33), and the first page of the Goodwin listings, including the Old Judges (here #127). Following that is the intro to the section on 20th century tobacco cards, and the page with all the small-sized sports cards (T200 etc., in modern parlance).

That's all I can put in the body of the post because we're limited to 18 images, but in the comments I'll post some more pages listing sports cards.