Friday, June 9, 2017

Uniformity, Uniformity, Uniformity, Uni...

When I got back in card collecting with vigor earlier this year, I decided to make set-building a priority and vowed not to fall back into the bad habits that had hampered previous attempts to do so. Part of this was to make sure I kept things neat and orderly. I am a very... let's say "particular"... person by nature. I'm not a neat freak by any means, but I definitely have an "a place for everything and everything in its place" kinda thing that I feel compelled to abide by. For example, the first thing I do when I sit down at a restaurant is to rearrange everything on the table - salt and pepper, sugar tray, etc - into an order that I find unobtrusive and calming. Yeah, and I never even realized I was doing this until someone pointed it out to me. I have a feeling that a lot of collectors, card and otherwise, have some mild form of OCD. The fact that I spent several hours last week reordering the cards in my all-time Brewers binders (now arranged by year the player debuted with the Brewers and within each year by the total number of games in which they appeared as a Brewer!) and the fact that it BOTHERED me when they only arranged by year and had no ordering system within each year rings pretty clearly as an at least mildly-obsessive behavior. But I doubt anyone in the collecting community would think twice about doing something that. After all, if they aren't in a specific order for a specific reason, why not just keep them loose in a trash bag?

Which brings me ... maybe? ... to my point of this post. To keep myself motivated in set-building, I need to make the process orderly. I want to keep my sets bindered in 9-pocket pages. Pages are a big expense, but I've found that you can routinely find cheap (and almost new) binders at Goodwill. In previous attempts at set-building, I had no system to displaying the binders themselves. But I think I've solved this...



BEHOLD! My organization is organized! White 2.5 inch binders (the '75 binder might be 3) with the clear plastic coating that allows for the display of a sample card from the enclosed set! Having four binders done up like this have given me a weird sense of pride. I just stare at it sometimes as I walk past and imagine how cool it's gonna look when I add a fifth and a sixth and even more. I've purposely kept the end cards a pretty random assortment. For the '10 and '14 sets, they were the only extra cards I could find, so I didn't have much of a choice. For '74 and '75, I just grabbed a couple of cards with cool pictures. I'll keep this standard up for the rest, I think. Maybe the end cards will give me fodder for some future post. But for now, I'm just happy to be able to walk past my binders without feeling that twinge I get when I first sit down at a restaurant.

How do you label your binders? What kind of organizational obsessions do you have? And - OH MY GOD - What am I going to do about the update binders that are too skinny for an end card????? (sits in corner of room, rocking with legs pulled to chest)
 

5 comments:

  1. You should consider laying those binders on their sides for fear that the sheets inside will sag and cause the cards to curl.

    I'm that OCD.

    I label my binders with either the names of the player(s) in the binder or by manufacturer and years. Within each binder, I have a small slip of paper in each pocket to show what cards I don't have or the card itself if I have it. That way, I keep the cards for each set in numerical order....

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  2. Hmmm ... looking for binders at Goodwill. That's a good idea. I may have to do that. As far as labeling goes, I'm beginning the process of reorganizing my cards (again) so the system I have now won't be valid much longer.

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    Replies
    1. They're almost always like new. .99-1.99 compared to $6 plus new.

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  3. Scroll down about halfway thru this post and you'll see my vintage set binders. I have more particular rules for the labeling than the storage of the cards inside.

    http://thecollectivemind.blogspot.com/2016/09/my-card-roomor-room-and-half-actually.html

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  4. Goodwill has contributed many a binder to my collection. Sorting and organizing my nine-pocket pages remains one of the most consistent thrills in the hobby for me. I could never just throw my cards into boxes, because what fun is that?

    Also, for some of my smaller binders, I use cards from the tiny Micro sets Topps and Donruss released in the early '90s. Not the most attractive cards, but they do the job.

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