Among the numerous sports collecting hobby publications that came and went in the 1960s was Collectors' Digest, which put out 12 erratically published issues between September 1964 and August 1966 before folding. The ninth of those 12 issues (September 1965) included an interesting article by Richard S. Egan on Card Collector's Bulletin and the hobby history to be gleaned from it, based on his perusal of Lionel Carter's complete run of CCBs. Egan had been semi-active in the hobby for several years, but in September 1965 he was just starting a very productive period of writing and research. Two months earlier in July 1965 he had started writing his "Egan's Alley" column in The Sports Trader, in which he systematically collected the known facts about various vintage baseball sets, and which he would continue to write well into the 1970s for several different publications (including The Ballcard Collector and The Trader Speaks). A few months later in January 1966, Egan put out his booklet on T206, the first really systematic look at that set, and in 1969 he published a well-regarded book on caramel cards. (T206Resource has Egan's T206 booklet available for download here:
http://t206resource.com/Images/Publi...eballCards.pdf)
In this article, Egan recounts his visit to see Lionel Carter, whose card collection "defies description and staggers the imagination". The highlight, for Egan, was his look through Carter's bound volumes of CCB. He notes how the prices in the earliest CCBs from the late 1930s had risen -- T200s were listed at 10 cents each in 1937, but in 1965 they went for $2 each! T206s were listed at 1 cent apiece back then, but they "sell today [1965] for 15c or more"! Of course, the 1965 prices now seem ridiculously low to us, but it just goes to show you how long collectors have been reminiscing/complaining about how much more affordable cards used to be. On the second page, Egan mentions some of the auction results and ads from back in the day. A T206 Plank was auctioned for $3.25 in August 1947, and 900 Old Judges ("worth over $1.00 each today") went for $300. Wirt Gammon had three T206 Wagners to trade -- "a card that was recently sold for $150 or more".
In the August 1, 1969 Card Collector's Bulletin (which I posted here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218786), Lionel Carter himself went through his old issues of CCB and noted some of the same things Egan did, including the 900 Old Judges for $300. In 2004, George Vrechek went through Carter's run of CCBs and wrote up what he found in a series of articles that were published in Sports Collector's Digest in 2004-2004, and (in condensed form) in the first issue of Old Cardboard in 2004. (Vrechek's full article on early hobby publications is here:
http://www1.coe.neu.edu/~dan/z-ns-start/CC.html, and his article on Burdick and the first issues of CCB, as published in SCD, is here:
http://www.sportscollectorsdigest.co...ctors-bulletin.) But it was Richard Egan who first went down that path almost 40 years earlier, though given the obscurity of Collectors' Digest, I doubt that many people have read his article before now.
04-25-2016, 11:24 PM
1965 Rich Egan article on Card Collectors Bulletin, early hobby history
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