Posted By:
Al CrisafulliIn the neighborhood in which I grew up, there was a man who collected Topps sets from packs from every year beginning in 1952. Unlike most kids, he would buy the packs, take the cards right out of the packs, put them in numerical order right in a box, and never look at them again. He kept his doubles, and those are the cards he played with.
Really.
So he had a complete run of gorgeous sets from every year Topps produced. As an adult, he kept them in what looked like a card catalog. His goal was to pass them along to his son someday.
The cards were razor sharp. Granted, he probably didn't pay attention to centering, since that's a relatively recent phenomenon, but I'd be willing to bet that there are a ton of high-grade cards in there, and I'm reasonably confident that those cards are still safely tucked away, out of the clutches of the hobby.
If there is one person like my old neighbor out of every 50,000 people in this country (and I think that's reasonable to assume), then there are something like five thousand high-grade, raw collections out there.
-Al