I was digging through some of my old hobby publications tonight and I found my 1976 and 1978 editions of the Sport Americana Baseball Card Checklist book by Dennis Eckes, with checklists of the major card sets from T206 up through the latest Topps sets. The 1976 edition has a 30-page "Sports Card Catalog" at the back that I spent hours poring over as a kid, and which I may post some of in a bit. The 1978 edition doesn't have that, but it does have a price survey on the last page by Dr. James Beckett, the first he ever published, and a precursor to the book-length Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide that Beckett and Eckes published the following year (the direct ancestor of the current annual Beckett guides). I figured folks here would find it interesting, so I scanned it, and here it is.
Of course the prices are incredibly low by today's standards, with $2500 for T206 Wagner, etc., but what's interesting to me is the difference in relative prices of some sets. For example, T207 commons cost more than four times T206 commons ($4.30 vs. $0.90), but today T207s only command a slight premium over T206s. In general, T206s and T205s were much cheaper relative to lots of postwar sets -- they were cheaper than Red Man tobacco cards, for crying out loud.
