For nearly 30 years, the name Bob Lemke was synonymous with the unbelievably comprehensive Krause publication The Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, the bible of card collectors across the country. These days, he's the editor of the Vintage Card section of the Standard Catalog, creates his own custom cards, and blogs about card variations at Bob Lemke's Blog. Bob stepped aside for a few minutes this week to answer a few questions.


BBC Blog: You've been identified with the publication of the annual Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards for many years. How did you get involved with the publication in the first place?

BL: In 1979 I had been employed by Krause Publications for five years, working in the firm’s numismatic division. As I returned to active card collecting in the mid-1970s I recognized that the card hobby was at a state that the coin collecting hobby had been in 20-30 years earlier.

BBC Blog: What are the origins of the Catalog?

BL: A basic hobby publishing tenet that KP’s founder, Chet Krause, had developed since the early 1950s is that to grow and prosper, a collecting hobby needs four basic types of publication: 1) A “trader” paper, published monthly or more frequently, that can connect buyers and sellers (this was in the days before the internet), 2) A glossy national newsstand magazine that can be used to attract the general public, 3) A comprehensive reference/pricing catalog that will allow even the beginning collector to be in the same ballpark as the advanced collector and dealer in terms of basic knowledge of what is available and what it’s worth, and, 4) A periodical price guide to allow for keeping collectors and dealers current in fast-changing markets.

After unsuccessfully trying to buy one or more of the existing hobby trader publications, in the Spring of 1980 we published the premiere issue of Baseball Cards magazine, the first national newsstand magazine for the hobby and instantly the largest circulation publication (125,000) ever in that field.

An integral part of BBC was a price guide section for 1948-date Topps and Bowman cards. That became the basis for the data base that produced the first Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards in 1983. As editor, then publisher of the sports division at KP, I was responsible for developing the line of products that eventually numbered something like seven papers and magazines and more than a dozen books. By the late 1980s we had a full-time editor for the catalog, and I took over than position in the mid-1990s when I semi-retired from my corporate responsibilities.

In May, 2006, I left Krause Publications and the catalog. I returned to the book on a part-time basis in the summer of 2009.


BBC Blog: It's obvious that an enormous amount of work goes into maintaining it each year. Do you work with a set group of people? What is the dynamic like?

BL: The catalog has an in-house staff responsible for maintaining the database and the presentation of the modern (1981+) sections of the book. My bailiwick is maintaining the database and presentation of the vintage major league and minor league sections. I don’t maintain an official cadre of outside contributors, but work with dozens of specialist collectors and dealers year-round who keep me apprised of new discoveries, market (price) movement and popularity trends.

BBC Blog: How do you handle "new" discoveries?

BL: The inclusion of new discoveries is made easier in this day and age by the instant communications offered by the Internet and the ease of providing “evidence” in the form of scans. Even though it is a shadow of itself, eBay for many years offered a huge 24/7 international card show where new things were discovered and up-to-the-minute real-world market values were readily available.


BBC Blog: A great number of vintage Spanish sets are included in the Catalog (Toteleros, Topps Venezuelan, etc.), but very few vintage Japanese sets. Was this done on purpose?

BL: Yes. The principal reason that so many vintage Caribbean and South American card issues have been included in the past is that those professional winter leagues typically included former and future major leaguers, and Negro Leagues players who didn’t appear on career-contemporary “American” cards. Because these players populate the checklists of such sets, they are more popular with collectors in the U.S. than Japanese cards.


BBC Blog: In addition to your own work on the vintage side of the Catalog, you blog about variations and have created a wonderful gallery of your own custom cards. Can you tell me about why you started to blog? And about why you create custom cards?

BL: I started the blog when I signed back on with the catalog so that I would have a venue to communicate with collectors and dealers for the purpose of gathering information to update the book. It also provides me with an outlet for feature writing about baseball and baseball cards.

Bob's newest custom card, a T202 Triple Folder Honus Wagner/Max Carey.
The custom cards have been, for the past six or more years, my principal hobby. I no longer actively collect sports cards other than to provide materials I need to make my “cards that never were.” The availability of user-friendly computer graphics programs allows me to lose myself for hours or even entire weekends in creating baseball and football cards in the styles of the classic cards of the early 20th Century.

Yes, I read Card Trade, the monthly, dealer-only rag put out by F&W Publications. No, I don't understand why they approved me for a subscription, either, but here we are.

I was perusing the April edition this afternoon and it struck me: the frustrations that you and I shared last summer (in the posts titled What Do Collectors Want? and The State of the Hobbyist) are also felt by dealers. They have seen their net profits continuously shrink year to year, their competitors tank, collectors come and go from lack of interest and manufacturers fail to respond in meaningful ways.

One of the issues the mag addresses is the idea of the 'lax collector' (ie, me), and how to attract them back into the fold. When I last spoke with the manufacturer from New York City, they were unconcerned with bringing the lax collector back, that we represented a small chunk of the overall audience not really worth targeting.

Angie Venturini's article in CT presents a very different viewpoint, one that's decidedly optimistic. To paraphrase: if you (were you a dealer) just show or tell lax collectors how great cards are today then they're sure to jump back in. I feel like that's only partly true. Sure, the lax collector is hard-wired (or was at one point) to collecting. Cards probably pop up in their thoughts and dreams when they least expect it (hey, they do for me...).

But most of the cards produced today really aren't that great. And isn't that what the lax collector would be coming back to? Sure, there are exceptions, and relics and autographed cards are, I admit, though begrudgingly, cool to pull in a pack. But how many more sets can do game-used cards as enticement? There hasn't been evolution in the hobby since the invention of the relic card. This is where manufacturers falter: they can't evolve. Collectors know it. Dealers seem to know it, too. We want something unique. Something new.

Manufacturers shouldn't just be interested in the lax collector. They should be using them as lab rats for new product. Who better to recommend a product out of the gate or cry bullshit on a crappy one? Anyway, enough of the diatribe.

One last thing about Card Trade. They have a small blurb in there about Tuff Stuff's desperation move against Beckett. Going forward, Tuff Stuff will be known as Tuff Stuff's Sports Collectors Monthly. To quote the publisher, Scott Kelnhofer: "Basically, we want people who see the magazine on the newsstand to have a better understanding of what the publication is about." I love that. Here's what that really means: We never had a problem with our publication until Beckett crowded us with their new monthly, so we decided to make the front cover of our pub look almost exactly the same as our competitor's. Can't fault them for trying.

Yesterday Beckett announced they're shifting the format and timing of their publications.
So let's cut to the chase. Is Beckett making the right move here? Or is this simply a re-hash of Waiting for Godot, as the biographer of that other Beckett paraphrases, "to keep the terrible silence at bay"? Since I'm a little late to this party, here are four things I've been thinking about today:


Competition is real, not matter where it's coming from (i.e. the Internet)
Although I'm probably taking myself and my writing way too seriously, bloggers like yours truly, Chris Harris, David Campbell and others are cutting into the Beckett audience. We're producing fresh content that's opinionated, truthful, and free to read. Heck, even TS O'Connell and the SCD crowd got on the blogging bandwagon earlier last year to keep up the pace.

By moving the printed edition to once every two months, Beckett cuts down on printer, distribution, shipping and production fees and moves their fresher content to the web (at least that's what I would do). So then what becomes of the Beckett Blog?


Where is all this new editorial content going to come from?
Back in the day, Beckett had a ton of new content every month, plus detailed price listings for the majority of sets. Besides Beckett, I distinctly remember Tuff Stuff clocking in at over 200 pages on more than a few occasions. But most of those 200-plus pages were advertisements, and the last time I checked, there aren't too many dealers out there today who can support a national advertising budget. Also, where's all this new content going to come from? Is there a room full of monkeys at typewriters that's going to help churn this stuff out? Or have blogs like Stale Gum, Cardboard Junkie, Cardboard Gods, and The Baseball Card Blog awoke a widespread kindred spirit of old baseball card collectors just itching to write?


What is the breakdown going to be?
With the Sports Card Monthly, are we looking at 10 pages of content for the four major sports and 5 pages for racing, golf, the WNBA and the WWE? Because it's starting to look a lot like Tuff Stuff.

Also, how will new card pricing be introduced? Through the monthly? Or as a way to boost sales of the single-sport magazine? If it's the former, then presumably there won't be an outcry from the hobby. But if it's the latter, and new cards are only introduced every two months, you can almost guarantee that there will be an outcry from the collectors and dealers who rely on Beckett almost every day. Newspapers publish stock prices five days a week for a reason.


The Ramifications of Upping the Cover Price
This is probably the most important thing to come out of this whole story, for two reasons. First, by charging more, Beckett is moving their magazines away from the casual collectors or lapsed collectors who maybe want to check out what's going on or find out how much their Canseco rookie is worth. It may not seem like much, but consider that right now Beckett Baseball is $4.99 per issue. If you buy it at the newsstand, $4.99 is almost the average cover price for any magazine not named US Weekly or OK!. But by suddenly adding between $3 and $5 to that cover price, you're pricing a lot of people out. Not that I would know, but $7.99 and $9.99 cover prices simultaneously scream out 'niche' and 'pornography,' which may seem appropriate, considering the way some collectors covet their cards.

The proposed change in cover price is also important because it will make Beckett more expensive than Tuff Stuff, truly it's only competitor. For those who don't see a difference between the two, it's like if Pepsi raised their suggested cost to $2 a can while Coke stayed at 99¢. Which one are you going to drink?


You could make the case that Beckett had to do something to combat stale months with no new pricing, the immediacy of content on the web, and so on, but then again, to quote the playwright: "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple, I can't make out."