These card are some of what's left of my original collecting days back in the late 1970s. I was six years old and had little care about wantlists, binders and other things that I pay attention to when I pick up new cards today. Back then, if I needed the card and it looked like it was cool, I wanted it. Then I placed it in a box that held my cards and other items.
The other day, I sent an email to Greg over at Night Owl Cards with this line: "most collectors aren't going to start with a '52 Mantle or T206 Wagner; they'll start with a mess and and try to figure out how to organize it."
And that's basically how I became a collector rather than a kid who just happened to have cards. Once I began realizing that I could work toward completing a set and began keeping track of what I needed, it was all downhill from there.
Today, what was once a haphazard pile of baseball cards with the Yankee players sorted out now looks like this:
That '79 set is now complete, but the binder still contains several of those cards I lovingly tortured as a kid. That includes the Thurman Munson card shown in the center, which I pulled from a wax pack a few days after his plane crash.
Now, I'm asking for input...what made you go from a kid who simply owned a few cards to being a more focused collector? Leave a comment, I'd really like to know.
I never really transitioned into a serious collector as a kid. I was always disorganized with shoe boxes full of cards and albums of random A's.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until I discovered eBay and later collecting blogs, as an adult, that I really became a focused collector. It was just a case of adult me being more organized than childhood me.
I think that I was somewhat organized from the beginning. I would always either keep my cards together by team, or by year (sometimes going back and forth). I started in 78, and kept this up until 81, when I completed my first topps set.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure I always organized my cards by team or by batting average or something. I would just stack them up and wrap them with a rubber band when I was done.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember what made me realize you could store them in binders, etc. Maybe reading Baseball Digest?