Hobby history: Card dealers of the early 1960s, part 1: Taylor vs. Gelman

[trdcrdkid]

In a recent post, I recounted the story of the earliest card dealers in the 1950s, specifically Sam Rosen, his stepson Woody Gelman, and Gordon B. Taylor. (You can read that post here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=233137.) I had originally planned to take that post into the mid-60s, but I had so much material that I had to stop at 1960. Now it looks like it will take at least three posts to cover all the material I wanted to, so that's what I'll do. This post will cover Taylor and Gelman in 1960-61 and beyond, and the next post will cover Marshall Oreck, Bruce Yeko, and other influential dealers who rose to prominence a few years later.

As 1960 dawned, the card collecting hobby was coming off several years of solid growth, and two dealers dominated the organized hobby: Gordon B. Taylor, and the Card Collectors' Company, owned by Woody Gelman, the art director of Topps. Both men were card collectors in their own right, and Gelman was one of the editors of the 1953 and 1960 editions of the American Card Catalog. As I recounted in that earlier post, Taylor and Gelman had a healthy competition going in the late 1950s, each one very aware of what the other was doing. In August 1958, Taylor launched a four-page magazine, Card Comments, to promote his business and card collecting in general; in March 1959, Gelman came out with a typeset pricelist, and the following month he lauched his own hobby magazine, The Card Collector, which was also typeset and looked nicer than Card Comments.

With the January 1960 issue of Card Comments, Taylor expanded the publication to fourteen 8.5" x 11" pages, up from sixteen pages half that size (5.75" x 8.5") in December 1959. The first two pages of that first larger issue were an illustrated profile of Taylor's card business, showing the office and a couple of his employees. I posted that article last May (in this thread: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=221922), but I'm including it again below to give an idea of what Taylor's business was like:




This larger size only lasted eight issues (January through August 1960) before Taylor decided to go in a different direction. Starting with the September 1960 issue, Card Comments went to a 5.5" x 8.25" size, but the pages were photographically reduced so that the same amount of text fit on each page as in the old 8.5" x 11" size. It was still typewritten rather than typeset, but it looked better than the 1958-59 version. That September 1960 issue also contained (tucked away on page 20) Taylor's announcement of TRADING CARD COLLECTORS OF AMERICA, a club that cost $5 a year to join. At the same time, Taylor revamped his price list, turning it from a 4-page typewritten list (shown at the end of my previous post) into a 40-page 5" x 7" booklet with descriptions of each set and a section at the back containing illustrations of all the sports sets, the first time such illustrations had been provided by a dealer.

Below are the first two editorial pages of the October 1960 Card Comments, with Taylor's description of the new price list on p. 2 and a progress report on Trading Card Collectors of America on p. 3. He already had 37 members from five states, and he had high ambitions for this organization, including a national convention and local chapters meeting monthly. (I suspect he didn't know about Bob Jaspersen's failed attempt to organize a national sports collectors' convention in 1956, which I wrote about here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=221393.) Below that, I've scanned the cover of Taylor's new 40-page price list, along with six pages from it, including promos for Trading Card Collectors of America and Card Comments, prices for 1951-1957 Topps baseball, and illustrations of 1951-59 Topps.







Woody Gelman did not take long to respond. Although The Card Collector had been billed as coming out bimonthly, and it looked nice, publication was somewhat erratic in practice, with the first eight issues being dated 4/15/59, 6/14/59, 7/15/59, 9/1/59, 12/1/59, 3/1/60, 6/20/60, and 9/20/60. I suspect that this was because it was basically a one-man operation, and Gelman was busy with his job at Topps, as well as running the Card Collectors' Company and helping with the American Card Catalog. With Gordon Taylor stepping up his game, Gelman realized that he couldn't do this all by himself and still compete, so he decided to delegate editorial duties. In the December 1, 1960 Card Collector, Gelman announced that the publication's new editor would be "the well-known collector Jim Zak". Zak was only 17 or 18 years old, but he had been active in the hobby for a while, and his age matched the target demographic of both The Card Collector and Card Comments, which was teenage and preteen boys (to judge by the letters to the editor and reader profiles).

Below are the front pages of issues 9 through 12 of The Card Collector, including Gelman's announcement of Zak's appointment and Zak's first three editorials with his plans for the publication. In the May 15, 1961 issue, he announced the formation of the "Card Collectors Club". This was a blatant copy of Taylor's "Trading Card Collectors of America", with the same yearly dues ($5) and same benefits (membership card and number, subscription, 10% discount). But Zak offered an additional treat: an original pen and ink drawing that had appeared on a Topps baseball card, obviously obtained from his boss Woody Gelman. I don't know how many such original drawings survive today, but I imagine they would go for a pretty penny at auction; here, though, they were seen as disposable trifles, offered to boost membership in a card collecting club.




It was at about this time that Gordon B. Taylor began running into trouble, though probably not due to anything that Zak and Gelman did. On the surface, his Card Comments seems to have been quite successful in its new format, with 24 or 28 pages each month from September 1960 to April 1961, and plenty of interesting articles about various sets. In the February 1961 issue (vol. 3, no. 7), Taylor announced a deal where his customers would get Gold Bond trading stamps with every purchase, and he also announced the availability of hardcover, gold-stamped "Taylor albums" to hold specific sets, starting with the 1961 Fleer All-Time Greats and 1961 Topps baseball:



In the April 1961 issue, Taylor had a cranky editorial about how bad the 1961 Topps baseball cards were (compare this with Jim Zak's praise for the 1961 Topps set in the June 15, 1961 Card Collector, scanned above), and on the back page of that issue he printed an apology for the issue being late, saying that he has been too busy. By the way, that is future "The Monster" author Bill Heitman sorting his T205s in the picture with his brother; if you want to read the second page of that article, I posted it in this thread: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=219136.




As far as I know, no issue of Card Comments appeared for the next five months, until September 1961. When that next issue finally came out in September, Taylor labeled it "vols. 3 & 4, nos. 11-12 & 1-2", and inside he began his editorial breezily with "Here we are -- right on time with the September issue", as if he meant all along to have a five-month break.




Taylor's excuse for the break in publication was that "we have been busy moving our offices to new and larger quarters", and he claimed to be "back on a 24-hour shipping schedule". He wrote enthusiastically about future issues and the coming year, but in fact this was the last issue of Card Comments, and Taylor soon sold his card inventory to M. A. Kohler and disappeared from sight.

It's not clear to me exactly what happened, but it's possible to hazard some guesses. Bruce Yeko, then an active dealer but living in Milwaukee, said in his 2011 interview with George Vrechek (which you can read here: http://www.oldbaseball.com/refs/Bruce_Yeko.pdf) that "Taylor got into trouble with another part-time mail-order business he owned and abruptly disappeared." I don't know about that, but it seems likely to me that Taylor was trying to expand his card business too fast and overextended himself financially. He was marketing new products like his "Taylor Albums" and moving to a new and bigger space (in New York City!) at a time when the card market was going through a bit of a rough patch. Evidence for this comes from the troubles that The Card Collector, was going through a year later. Even with his main competition gone, Jim Zak wrote an editorial for the May 30, 1962 Card Collector basically begging his readers to solicit subscriptions from their friends, and the following month he wrote that the paper was losing $600 a year and would be limited to 8 pages until subscriptions picked up.



After the September 1962 issue, The Card Collector did not come out with a new issue for six months. When a new issue finally appeared, in March 1963, it consisted of six 8.5" x 11" sheets stapled together and was typewritten rather than typeset to save money. Zak's apologetic editorial promised that "we will strive to be bigger and better for '63", but after only two more issues in the same format (dated May 31 and September 1, 1963), Zak announced that The Card Collector would be suspending publication for a while, because "The card business, over the past year, has been very poor and despite every attempt at economy we are still losing quite a bit of money on the Card Collector."




As you can see above, Zak promised to try to come out with a four-page "newsletter", and in fact he did come out with a new issue of The Card Collector dated November 1, 1963, typeset using the old format, but consisting of a single 9" x 12" sheet of paper folded in half to make four pages. He did in fact continue to publish it monthly for a while, and in the March 1964 issue he started a monthly auction. But this revival lasted for less than a year, and the August 30, 1964 issue of The Card Collector was the last one.

Despite the demise of The Card Collector, Woody Gelman's Card Collectors' Company made it through all this unscathed, and continued to be one of the biggest card dealers in the country for another couple of decades. Here are the front pages of their 1962 and 1963 price lists, which now included thumbnail pictures of a sample card from each set.



Note that Gelman was charging a premium for 1962 and 1963 cards of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle -- an early example of charging extra for star cards. This would become a more prevalent practice over the next few years, fueled by newly prominent dealers who became major competitors to The Card Collectors' Company. But that will have to wait for the next post.