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Posted By: Mark Macrae

Plastic sheets for baseball cards evolved from the clear sheets which were made for storing photographs in the early 70's. Around '73, I remember buying a small binder (at Toys R Us) with logos of the Major League teams on the cover & it contained about 5 or 6 nine pocket pages with sheets manufactured by K & M in Southern California. I don't recall seeing much competition for a couple years, but by the late 70's there were a handful of companies pushing sheets. Almost all were PVC, and could damage your cards (in a number of ways) over time. Prior to the availability of these sheets, many collectors used photo corners in scrapbooks, pasted, glued or taped their cards into books. Some simply stored them in boxes, but you couldn't really look at them that well in boxes. There was actually a guy from Tennessee that made sheets that would hold around 100 cards (Around 1976) . They were designed to hang on a wall. Fortunately this design didn't take off