Post v. Prewar Discussion (In the Postwar forum)...

[jchcollins]

I think of this kind of like the earlier thread on high grade cards v. mid-grade, and the tradeoff between having a few things of super high quality, or many things of lower but acceptable quality. I kind of have been having the same debate with myself lately on pre- vs. postwar cards. Does anyone else do this? From all I have been able to tell lately in searching out many auctions and sales, it's the same type of trade-off proposition. With postwar cards, mainly 50's and 60's for me - I can have a fairly sizeable collection of stars, HOFers, some graded some not - in the PSA 4-6 range without breaking the bank or at least without going to divorce court.

Every now and then I get a hankering to look at something in the same category nice for prewar, and I'm blown away. Here lately it was with 1915 Cracker Jack cards. My examples there are even beat-up HOF'ers routinely go for north of a grand. For example I was lusting over an SGC 3 Grover Cleveland Alexander for sale now at like $2300. Technically I could afford that, but it would mean selling off 5 or 6 other post-war slabs, higher grades - that at the end of the day is a tradeoff I'm not willing to make for just one card. Ok, so maybe my example there would be more realistic if the same Alexander card in like a 1 or 2 was $700 or a grand cheaper...

Does anyone else tend to look at the difference in eras this way? At the end of the day, though I'm often really enticed by a lot of nice prewar cards - I find I'm never really willing to make the tradeoff since for the same money I can get so much more bang for the buck in the postwar dept. I'm sure things would have been different had I been old enough to have been exposed to prewar at an age when I could have afforded it - say had I started collecting in the mid 70's instead of the late 80's. As a kid (I was 9 in '86) there was plenty of postwar vintage in shops, but any kind of mass prewar collections were rare to be seen. I saw the occasional T206 at a show or something like that, but just never had great reason - and certainly not the money at that age - to get into them.

Thoughts? Thanks.