A Hobby to Many, Card Collecting Was Life’s Work for One Man
By KEN BELSON
Published: May 22, 2012
Baseball fans argue endlessly about the best ever to play the game, tossing around names like peanuts at a ballpark. But no one disputes that the greatest card collector was Jefferson R. Burdick.
William MacKay, above, said of Burdick: “It was like meeting someone who started the Dewey Decimal System.”
Some hobbyists have more cards and some investors have more valuable collections. Yet all of them owe a debt of gratitude to Burdick, an unassuming bachelor from upstate New York who essentially created modern card collecting.
The father of card collectors, as Burdick was known among his admirers, amassed more than 30,000 baseball cards that are presumed to be worth millions of dollars.
But they will never reach the marketplace because Burdick gave his trove to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the storehouse of civilization known for its Egyptian mummies, medieval armor and Renoirs. It also houses one of the largest baseball card collections in a public institution.
As the 50th anniversary of Burdick’s death approaches next year, the museum is trying to fulfill his wish that the cards be available to everyone. A small team of archivists has embarked on a multiyear project to photograph his baseball cards for online publication. The museum is seeking outside financing to speed the process.
Yet those cards represent only one-tenth of Burdick’s portfolio, which included postcards, cigar bands, paper dolls and mountains of other ephemera from the 19th and early 20th centuries — a tapestry of advertising and print history and a window into the popular culture of the time.
“He was a collector’s collector,” said Freyda Spira, the museum’s assistant curator in the drawings and prints department. “He didn’t collect cards because of their value but because of his interest in history.”
For years, the museum made the cards available for viewing on request. Burdick had painstakingly pasted them into hundreds of albums, a process that horrifies today’s dedicated collectors, who are so obsessed with the condition of their cards that they store the most valuable of them in Lucite. But Burdick’s cards were susceptible to damage and, sadly, theft, so the museum now allows only serious researchers to handle them. It does, however, display several dozen cards for six months at a time in the American Wing, not far from the Temple of Dendur.
An Amateur Historian
To collectors, nothing can replace the colors, smells and textures of the original cards and no one, it seems, will replace Burdick, either. Born in 1900 on a farm in Central Square, N.Y., 25 miles north of Syracuse, Burdick began collecting as a child. Like other youngsters, he was enamored with the cards given away by tobacco companies, and he asked his father to smoke different brands of cigarettes so he could get different cards, according to an interview he gave to The Syracuse Herald-American in 1955.
In 1922, Burdick earned a two-year degree in business from Syracuse University. He appeared to have stopped collecting in his 20s as he held various jobs, including one in the advertising department at The Syracuse Herald, before landing at Crouse-Hinds, an electronics company in Syracuse.
In his early 30s, he learned he had chronic arthritis, which slowly warped his fingers, stiffened his body and made painful even simple tasks like putting on a jacket. Burdick, who never married or had children, continued to work, assembling small ignitions and fuses, a job he could do while sitting.
His diminished mobility rejuvenated his interest in collecting, which had broadened to include greeting cards, playing cards and valentines. He found solace in the thousands of cards he bought, often for pennies, and he reveled in the stories they told.
“A Card Collection is a magic carpet that takes you away from work-a-day cares to havens of relaxing quietude where you can relive the pleasures and adventures of a past day — brought to life in vivid picture and prose,” Burdick wrote in the introduction to the 1960 edition of the American Card Catalog, which he first published under a different title in 1939.
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By KEN BELSON
Published: May 22, 2012
Baseball fans argue endlessly about the best ever to play the game, tossing around names like peanuts at a ballpark. But no one disputes that the greatest card collector was Jefferson R. Burdick.
William MacKay, above, said of Burdick: “It was like meeting someone who started the Dewey Decimal System.”
Some hobbyists have more cards and some investors have more valuable collections. Yet all of them owe a debt of gratitude to Burdick, an unassuming bachelor from upstate New York who essentially created modern card collecting.
The father of card collectors, as Burdick was known among his admirers, amassed more than 30,000 baseball cards that are presumed to be worth millions of dollars.
But they will never reach the marketplace because Burdick gave his trove to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the storehouse of civilization known for its Egyptian mummies, medieval armor and Renoirs. It also houses one of the largest baseball card collections in a public institution.
As the 50th anniversary of Burdick’s death approaches next year, the museum is trying to fulfill his wish that the cards be available to everyone. A small team of archivists has embarked on a multiyear project to photograph his baseball cards for online publication. The museum is seeking outside financing to speed the process.
Yet those cards represent only one-tenth of Burdick’s portfolio, which included postcards, cigar bands, paper dolls and mountains of other ephemera from the 19th and early 20th centuries — a tapestry of advertising and print history and a window into the popular culture of the time.
“He was a collector’s collector,” said Freyda Spira, the museum’s assistant curator in the drawings and prints department. “He didn’t collect cards because of their value but because of his interest in history.”
For years, the museum made the cards available for viewing on request. Burdick had painstakingly pasted them into hundreds of albums, a process that horrifies today’s dedicated collectors, who are so obsessed with the condition of their cards that they store the most valuable of them in Lucite. But Burdick’s cards were susceptible to damage and, sadly, theft, so the museum now allows only serious researchers to handle them. It does, however, display several dozen cards for six months at a time in the American Wing, not far from the Temple of Dendur.
An Amateur Historian
To collectors, nothing can replace the colors, smells and textures of the original cards and no one, it seems, will replace Burdick, either. Born in 1900 on a farm in Central Square, N.Y., 25 miles north of Syracuse, Burdick began collecting as a child. Like other youngsters, he was enamored with the cards given away by tobacco companies, and he asked his father to smoke different brands of cigarettes so he could get different cards, according to an interview he gave to The Syracuse Herald-American in 1955.
In 1922, Burdick earned a two-year degree in business from Syracuse University. He appeared to have stopped collecting in his 20s as he held various jobs, including one in the advertising department at The Syracuse Herald, before landing at Crouse-Hinds, an electronics company in Syracuse.
In his early 30s, he learned he had chronic arthritis, which slowly warped his fingers, stiffened his body and made painful even simple tasks like putting on a jacket. Burdick, who never married or had children, continued to work, assembling small ignitions and fuses, a job he could do while sitting.
His diminished mobility rejuvenated his interest in collecting, which had broadened to include greeting cards, playing cards and valentines. He found solace in the thousands of cards he bought, often for pennies, and he reveled in the stories they told.
“A Card Collection is a magic carpet that takes you away from work-a-day cares to havens of relaxing quietude where you can relive the pleasures and adventures of a past day — brought to life in vivid picture and prose,” Burdick wrote in the introduction to the 1960 edition of the American Card Catalog, which he first published under a different title in 1939.
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