Obscurity

We recently analyzed rarity.  Now let’s talk about rarity’s bastard brother, obscurity.  There are dozens of cards, hell, there are entire sets that are rarer than the T206 Wagner.  But they sell for a fraction of its value.  Why?  Because they are obscure. 

The million-dollar question, literally, is how does demand for a rare card arise?  This week we discuss the transformation from obscure rarity to known rarity. 

A category of collectible needs three things before it can move out of obscurity: a taxonomy, a lexicon, and publicity.  Taxonomy is a system of classification.  Lexicon is the vocabulary of a branch of knowledge, and it must expand beyond the basics if the category is to enter the consciousness of the average collector, give him something to talk about.  Without those elements, a pile of cards is just a pile of cards.  With them, it is a collection.  The phrase “T206 Wagner” epitomizes these elements.  A collector knows precisely what “T206 Wagner” means and can place it in context by drawing on a decades-long history of discussions about the card, its origins, the player it depicts, and so on. 

Much of the foundation for the hobby was laid by the inestimable Jefferson Burdick, who really created the core taxonomy for the hobby.  When I visited his collection some years ago for my own research, I was blown away at how monumental the task was for him and how staggeringly comprehensive his collection was.  Not just into mainstream cards as we collect them, Burdick even wrote entire books on subjects such as postcards. 

Burdick, however, was one man trying to make sense of a hundred years of cards without modern reference tools.  What Burdick did not, or could not, do was to flesh out the taxonomy, to expand the lexicon.  Burdick’s creation was a list of sets without checklists or discussion.  No nuance, no context.  Not a guide.  That fell to later commentators.  Principal among them for baseball cards was Lew Lipset.  The value of his encyclopedia of baseball cards cannot be underestimated.  Lew did what several collector publications had been doing piecemeal for years, namely, to put context into the discussion, but he did it in one place, in the process giving depth to the lexicon of prewar baseball card collecting that was instantly accessible to anyone who read his books.  Many of the discussions in his books are now outdated or proven incorrect, but the way he treated the subject matter gave collectors a broader base for discussion, and it gave me and so many other writers a model for hobby research and writing.

Which brings me to my first foray into this field, boxing cards.  I had first been taken with boxing cards around 1990, at a card show in Anaheim California.  A dealer had 1948 Leaf cards of Barney Ross and Benny Leonard. I sort of knew that boxing cards existed but seeing these, I was instantly smitten. I bought the pair for a few bucks and took them home to show my father. He looked at the Ross card and said the words that changed my collection forever:

“I think my cousin Ray fought him.”

You could have knocked me over with a puff of air. “Dad,” I said, “if you have a cousin who was a pro boxer that means I have cousin who was a pro boxer.” He then told me about Ray Miller for the first time and I realized that I was related to a professional athlete.  It turned out I was related to two of them.  Another cousin from Chicago was a boxer too, Benny Berris.  Ray was a world-class fighter, #1 lightweight contender in the late 1920s.  Benny was a club fighter, but still a pro with over 70 fights including one victory over a future HOFer.

Chasing Cousin Ray’s cards (he is in the several sets including the1951 Topps Ringside set) got me into boxing cards.  After trying to learn more about them, I realized that boxing cards as a field was terribly neglected.  There was a book from an English writer named Evan Jones called “Seconds Out”, not issued in the USA at all, and it was incomplete and did not furnish more than checklists and illustrations.  No context or discussion, and the American card section was decidedly incomplete and often inaccurate.  I decided to fix that, the goal being expanding taxonomy and lexicon of boxing cards.  I modeled what I did on Burdick and Lipset’s earlier works.  I figured that with the catalog would come interest and with interest would come discussion and collecting. 

I think boxing cards would have gotten there eventually because the cards are really awesome (look at a T218 Jack Johnson and tell me otherwise), but I abhor false modesty, so I will say that I definitely gave boxing card collecting a higher profile more quickly by providing a fleshed-out framework for discussing and contextualizing the issues.  Ironically, I cost myself a bundle by publicizing rare card issues that I was collecting, but I wanted to jump-start that discussion because I wanted more friends who were into the same niche cards I was (yeah, I can be that needy).  I tried to do the same thing with my Exhibit card book.  The value boosting effect was a nice side-effect but given the extraordinary time-suckage that writing a book takes, making money was not a primary goal.

Next time we put the pieces together to generate value.