Hobby history: 1946 Trading Post article on baseball cards

[trdcrdkid]

Here's a little hobby history item that I hadn't noticed before. The Sports Exchange Trading Post, a monthly sports paper published from 1945 to January 1950, had a fair amount of material about collecting sports items, and thus counts as an early hobby publication. I've posted some things from it, such as Buck Barker's 1949 columns on baseball card collecting (here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=222057). One column that appeared fairly regularly was "Candid Shots (Taken From The Collector's Angle)" by Harold L. Esch, a sportswriter who would become a prominent card collector in later decades. In the September 1, 1946 issue of Sports Exchange Trading Post, Esch wrote about "Gum Cards", presenting them as exotic and "unobtainable" since none had been produced since before the war. He describes the most prominent sets of the 1930s and cites Wirt Gammon's article on cigarette cards from the January 11, 1945 Sporting News, which I posted here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=238775. Esch expresses a hope that gum cards might make a comeback, which they would not do until two years later.

Nothing all that exciting, but an interesting window into baseball card collecting as it existed right after World War II.