When I started collecting in 1985, I immediately saw the whole idea of collecting for condition to be ridiculous. Never have I paid more for a card because it was mint or something, and have broken many PSA or SGC cases open just to touch the actual card itself. Some of my most cherished cards have writing or stamps on them. It's part of the journey they make.
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Kinda a pathetic story in a way. The museum is being given a multi million dollar collection, and their reaction is, "Only if you catalog it for us first." So the poor chap basically kills himself toiling away on the project, going into the hospital the very next day (to die) after finishing the project. On top of that, the museum lets people view the collection in private and rob the most expensive cards, so they don't even protect the collection.
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KK: Those were the old days...it has been a long time since you could just waltz in and ask to see the collection and peel cards off. It was a reference to the past you read.
If you want to see PART of this collection now, you have to inquire, make an appointment, have numbers you are interested in (I.E T210's, N145's, E123, R5, R60 etc)They pull the books/albums for you, You have a limited amount of time to look at them with a staff member in the same room.
Last I heard, it was pretty hard to get a look at all.
I agree with you wholeheartedly though on the ungrateful attitude but Ol Jeff's endurance is part of our collecting heritage.. HE WAS EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED(wink to adam)...He had passion..That is NOW recognised by the museum and all collectors worldwide.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well....J Burdick understood.
"showin the love since 1960"
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Charley ,it's the same with the Wharton-Tigar collection in Old London Town .
You have to book in advance , send a blood sample , take an IQ test , wear soft shoes and close one eye when looking at blemished cards ....
well to be honest it's not that easy to get in but you just can't jump out of the cab and catch a card or 2 .
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The most prolific researcher of this stuff is Bob Forbes without a doubt.......he's spent a bunch of time there at the Met in the Burdick collection. I've talked with him a bunch about it and he's gotten me extensive details including some photos on the E cards in Burdick's collection. My recollection of his trips is that you have to 'book' in advance with details about what books you want to look at. There is a 'guide' or book of the books detailing what is in each album. I'd assume that you can't say you want to look at 30 different albums as that's probably not realistic to look at so much. I know Bob Forbes was heavily researching the L/B/S issues for work he's doing and he graciously added my E questions to his list. I know he spent a couple days there a couple years ago and said that they open late, close early and take a long lunch, so the available daily time to peruse the stuff is very small.......in addition, to look at it anymore, due to all the pilferage, you have to be a 'serious' researcher. He obviously fits that bill to a tee but what would happen with the rest of us schmucks if we called? I know he takes flowers or candy or something for the staff there when he goes and goes out of his way to follow to a tee all the rules and regulations of visiting and viewing the collection. A shame some of the predecessors have not done that.......
As for Wharton-Tigar's collection, I have discussions with someone in the UK who visited that last year I think and when they went, they were the first person who had visited it in like 6 months. I think it's a little different collection as it's in archival pages and not glued down as it was donated at a much later time when people understood a little more about the integrity of both the front and back of the cards. I know the R and E sections of the Wharton-Tigar collection aren't as strong as Burdicks though from the discussions I've had with this person. He did have a couple thousand Old Judge BB cards from what I had heard and his Nonsports Allen Ginter sets looked like they just came off the cutting presses. Would love to have the time to look at both collections one day but it'll have to wait quite a while.......
As for Burdick doing all that work, it is a bit of a bummer but I assume he too wanted to catalog them in a way that built of the ACC that he'd created. Remember at the time, when donated, no one knew it was anything like a 'multimillion dollar' collection. It was just 300,000+ cards glued into albums, examples of early American advertising.
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It makes me wonder what the museum directors actually thought of Burdick when he offered them his collection. Sure, looking back on it now, we can all agree how important and monumental his assemblage of paper and cardboard was, but I just wonder if the whole, "We'll take them if you will painstakingly assemble them into albums" line was just to see if he would do it. Or perhaps some kind of test to see how serious he was?
No doubt, by the time he had completed his work, his enthusiasm and love for the hobby would have been contagious to those who saw him hard at work, day in and day out. But I still wonder if their original reaction was as "welcoming." I'm not trying to denigrate Burdick or his contribution. I just can't imagine what that initial meeting would have looked like.
I'm also trying to picture what an equivalent scenario would be today, and how a museum director would react to being offered a collection of something similar nowadays, keeping in mind that at the time Burdick was donating his collection, none of the cards were worth anywhere near what they are now.
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I visited the Trade Card part of his collection about 20 years ago,& There was a guard standing over me every minute. I felt like I was seeing a prisoner in a penitentiary. At first, I was only allowed to view one album at a time. I'd look at the album that I requested, then ask for another. He would be gone for about ten+ minutes. Eventually they allowed two on the cart to be brought to be viewed.
Even tho it was somewhat cumbersom...it was a thrill.
I asked for a Photo/copy of a page ~ they said that would be $90.00 (I think that was the $).
I went with out. Policy might have change since then???
Ron
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My post on the sports side from my research visit:
Burdick Collection Visit
April 4 2004 at 10:54 AM
I visited the Burdick Collection at the Met for two and a half hours on Friday. Here are my impressions:
Getting into the collection is like getting into the white house. You announce yourself at the front desk of the museum, where they check your ID and call up to the prints department to verify your appointment. You are issued a pass for the library and given directions. The library room of the prints department is behind a locked door. You ring a doorbell and they buzz you into the antechamber, where they take your bags, coat (if you haven't checked it), camera, pens, etc., and you have to produce your ID again, fill out a card with your info, and read and sign a page-long rules and regulations list. Once all that is done, they lead you into the reading room.
The reading room looks just like the reading room in any library; a couple of big tables with chairs. Only in this reading room, attendants hover and you cannot pull books at will from the shelves. The attendant sets up a velvet placemat in front of you and (because the collection is housed in books) two velvet covered bolsters on either side of the mat. The book is placed inside this rig so that it never lays flat, only in a "V".
You have to know exactly what you want to see and you more or less have to direct the curators to the proper volumes. Burdick wrote and printed a guide to the collection (it is in the same typeface and paper as the ACC, so I know it was printed) breaking up the collection by volume. If you are not very up on your nomenclature, you are dead in the water. For example, Book 202 is described as "A&G 1-48, 63-65" (not exactly, just as an example) and that's all the detail you get from Burdick. I tried to pre-arrange my viewing by sending them exact set names and numbers I wanted. The head curator told me that they could only ID about half of the sets ahead of time. I was able to locate the rest inside of two minutes just by viewing the book and knowing manufacturer and ACC designation (more on the lack of knowledge of the caretakers later).
Once they know what to get, they go fetch it for you. They roll in a cart with the books of the cards you want to see and they place a book in front of you. You are not allowed to touch the cards (obviously) or to have more than one book at a time. You can turn the pages yourself.
Remember that this entire collection is one guy's stuff, arranged by him. The poor bastard sat there for three years pasting down this stuff, and you could see that as he went on, he got less and less interested in tabbing things. By the time you get into the later albums, there are virtually no tabs at all, which made finding sets a bit of a challenge.
The paramount ground rule I was told of was "no looking at baseball cards." They were very adamant about this. However, the disorganization of the collection is such that you have to look through albums to get to certain sets, meaning that I had to look at baseball sets to find the boxing sets I was there to study, which led to a kind of funny incident. I was looking for the E211 set (York Caramel boxing) and had to go through an untabbed volume loaded with every E card you could think of to do it. The curator came over and said "you are looking at baseball cards." I said "no, I am looking for the E211 set of boxing cards." I started to describe what I was looking for, her eyes glazed over, and I had to keep going. What a shame...
In terms of my research, the collection was very useful. I was able to verify the existence of many cards, found many uncatalogued variations, and was able to flesh out some checklists. Oddly enough, however, Burdick was very spotty on certain sets. He had only 1 T229 Pet/Kopec card and only 2 E211 York Caramel cards.
Now for the fun stuff you all might appreciate: Owing to the organizational issues, I was able to view some of the OJ's, CJ's, E cards, and T cards. It is obvious that Burdick cared more about completion than condition. Cards range all over the place from poor to near mint. The OJ's I saw were organized by team, with an added section of miscellaneous cards, and averaged ex. The CJs were gorgeous--obviously a near mint set. Most of the T cards were strong ex to ex-mt. The T227 Cobb was stellar ex-mt. The Fatimas had lots of cracks and creases. Burdick also had two of the Fatima style PC backed cards, but in a different book--he obviously did not consider them to be Fatimas. The common E cards from the 1920s were all razor sharp sets. The E210 set was all over the place, from poor to ex, mostly vg. The great shame of it all was that every card was friggin glued down, very firmly. the CJ Jackson was obviously an "8" when it was put into place, but is poor now.
I was surprised and saddened by how little the curators knew about the cards (as I said above,they could not even find many of the sets I needed because they did not know Burdick's nomenclature and when I tried to talk cards with them, they obviously had no idea what I was saying). It was sad as well to see just how under-utilized and under-catalogued the cards were. Burdick did a monumental job of collecting and mounting these cards, but a crappy job of cataloguing and indexing them. There are albums with literally nothing to define what is in them other than a single line entry. It appears that no work has been done to see what is in this collection over the last 40 years. In the boxing cards alone, I found literally dozens of unknown cards and variations that have been sitting there for 40 years, ready to be discovered. The head curator even admitted at the end of my visit that they don't know much about the collection. Consequently, a very valuable and very useful resource sits mostly unused and "unloved" in albums in the bowels of the museum.
The trip was an absolutely amazing experience. Burdick's collection is unparalleled and priceless. It also was a thrill to see his writing and his notations right there on the pages he mounted, and to see what he was thinking when organizing the ACC.
Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc
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