When Did We Learn About The Card?
When did people start figuring out that the T-206 Honus Wagner was something special?
When Did We Learn About The Card?
Have you ever wondered when people first started talking about the famous “T-206” Honus Wagner baseball card?
The scarcity of this card was common knowledge when I was growing up — as was the somewhat arbitrary “T-206” set designation. I feel like I was born knowing about it. In hindsight, I can be forgiven for thinking that way: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, baseball card history and speculation was rampant, permeating American society to its core.
But, of course, it wasn’t always that way.
The famous card collector Jefferson Burdick was the man responsible for the system we use to designate most pre-World War II card sets. Burdick amassed one of the largest baseball card collections in the world, and, frankly, collected every type of commercially printed card imaginable, including many not related to sports.
The culmination of Burdick’s careful research was a book called The American Card Catalog. Most modern collectors don’t use the book at all; in fact, I’d wager that most of the guys you see on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so forth have likely never even heard of Burdick. The American Card Catalog was the first card price guide I’m aware of, and was a massive effort intended to scientifically identify and categorize the myriad of different printings and releases in those early years.
Burdick’s system included a literal alphabet of classifications. You can read about the most important ones in this PreWarCard post. Most baseball cards fit under the following:
D — used for cards that came together with bread or other bakery items;
E — used for cards packaged with candy or caramel products (E apparently stands for Early Candy / Caramel);
M — used for cards that were distributed in magazines or newspapers (M stands for Magazine);
N — used for tobacco cards from the 1800s;
T — used for tobacco cards from the 1900s.
This can help you understand what the designations on pages like this originally stood for:
The numbers, by the way, were entirely arbitrary. They were apparently numbered according to the order in which Burdick categorized his system, and have nothing to do with when the sets actually came out. That’s why the T206 set is numbered “206,” despite the fact that the T3 “Turkey Red” set came out afterwards.
Now, if you look hard enough, you can see some of Burdick’s original contributions to the hobby world. For example, he wrote numerous articles in Hobby Magazine in the 1930s, such as this:
Want to know how much the hobby landscape has changed? In those days, Hobby Magazine did not have a dedicated section to card collecting. Burdick’s half dozen or so articles in those years were clumsily placed under “Old Prints” — a designation, by the way, that was separate from “Book Collecting.”
I could write a lot about those old Hobby Magazine issues. You’ve got collectors, sure — but you’ve also got people who look a lot like modern hoarders, putting in want ads month after month for old wrapping paper or other odd items. I suppose one man’s trash will always be another man’s treasure.
I’ll tell you more about Burdick and the real early days of card collecting as time goes on. Burdick created a hand produced magazine of his own called Card Collectors Bulletin back in 1937 and 1938 — and, fortunately, a kind soul over at the Net 54 baseball card forum has scanned articles from numerous issues.
But we wanted to talk about the card, right? The famous Honus Wagner card. How long did it take Burdick to know this was really something special?
Well, I’m not sure what the answer to that question is. I do know, however, that news about the extremely scarce and nice looking Wagner card spread as early as the 1950s. See this article, for example:
Notice, of course, that Burdick didn’t specialize in baesball cards. he collected all sorts of small printed cards.
This might be the original source of the unconfirmed rumor that Wagner wanted the card held back because of his disagreement with smoking. Of course, that story seems silly when we consider his 1949 Leaf card:
And yeah, that’s right — I said 1949 Leaf. More on that later.