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)