In the fall of 1976, Jim Beckett, then a professor of statistics at Bowling Green State University as well as a collector and dealer of baseball cards, got the idea of doing a survey of other collectors and dealers in order to determine the market value of various cards and card sets. He wrote up a survey, and the September 30, 1976 issue of Sports Collectors Digest announced his project, and his intention to distribute the survey at various card conventions and by mail. The October 31, 1976 SCD had a status report by Beckett, clarifying what he hoped to achieve with the survey, and the January 15, 1977 SCD printed the survey itself. The results of this first survey appeared in SCD in two parts: in the March 31, 1977 issue for Topps and Bowman cards, and in the April 30, 1977 issue for all other card sets. Beckett was primarily trying to determine the average value of a common card in each set, because that's the way most people thought about card values at the time; but he also included one star player in the survey, the 1954 Hank Aaron (which had gotten a big boost from Aaron breaking Ruth's home run record) to test the "controversial" idea that cards of star players were worth more. This survey was enough of a success that Beckett repeated it the following year, and the results of that 1978 survey were published in the July 15, 1978 SCD. (An abbreviated version was also in the 1978 edition of the Sport Americana Baseball Card Checklist book.) The year after that, Beckett teamed up with Denny Eckes to publish the Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide, which took the unthinkable (at the time) step of providing values for each individual card, in three different grades. That was just in time to catch the card boom of the 1980s, fueled by the 1952 Mantle and the new concept of rookie cards, and the rest is history.
Here are those original articles in SCD, including the prefatory articles and the results of the 1977 and 1978 surveys. These articles, along with the articles about card prices from 1966-76 that I just posted, and the annual Beckett guides starting in 1979 (all of which I have up to 1991), allow one to trace card prices more or less continuously for the last 50 years.
