In a move that would make Chris Harris of Stale Gum proud, I went out of my way late last week to add a Jefferson Burdick card to my collection. And it was not just any Burdick card — OK, to be fair he basically has one card and a parallel — it was the mini version, essentially made to look like the original tobacco cards.

Whose this Burdick guy with his head all cocked to the side? Harris has covered that extensively — in a nutshell, this was the grandmaster of card collecting. He created the standard catalog system for baseball cards and was a great collector in his own right. In fact, his collection is housed at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During my trip to the East Coast earlier this year, my wife and I had a chance to visit The Met. And in a dimly lit hallway near an emergency exit in a area deemed “storage” were a few examples of Burdick’s collection. Among them is the Holy Grail, the 1909-1911 T206 Honus Wagner.

I do have one question for the museum though: How is this card attached to the frame? It seems clear to me that the card is not merely “floating” inside the matted area. There has to be some sort of adhesive used. Glue and baseball cards don’t exactly mix, ya know?

This entry was posted on September 13, 2010 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Newspaperman with tags baseball, baseball cards, Honus Wagner T206, Jefferson Burdick, sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.