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A Hobby to Many, Card Collecting Was Life’s Work for One Man

A small part of Jefferson R. Burdick’s collection is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is considered the father of card collecting.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

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.

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.

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William MacKay, above, said of Burdick: “It was like meeting someone who started the Dewey Decimal System.”Credit...Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

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.

To streamline and promote the hobby in the early 1930s, Burdick developed the system for classifying cards by manufacturer and type of illustration. Each set or series was given a letter to indicate how or when it was issued, followed by a number.

Using this nomenclature, T206, the most famous set of baseball cards, was issued by a tobacco company in the 20th century. The 200 series designated sports cards, and the low-200s number indicated baseball cards in particular. Early candy and gum cards were assigned an E for early, while postcards were assigned a PC. Other classifications made less sense. Gum cards issued starting in 1933, for example, were labeled with an R.

Burdick updated his catalog until his death, though his classification system is most widely used for cards made before 1933. Burdick’s identification system for the oldest cards is still used despite a flood of cards issued in the last few decades, a testament to his ingenuity and the reverence for him among collectors.

He shared his catalogs with a small but growing network of like-minded hobbyists, and he encouraged them to swap cards and knowledge, forming a fraternity of sorts. Burdick did not just organize cards; he also became the hobby’s de facto historian. He shared information he gathered from the companies that issued cards, and in efficient prose, he wrote about the history of advertising inserts and printmaking, as well as the subjects on the cards, whether clipper ships, opera singers or ballplayers.

He burrowed into obscure topics, like the rage for Turkish tobacco before World War I, and explained that the Chinese and the Hindus were among the first to use playing cards, and that the cards made their way to Europe via Egypt on ships filled with spices and silks.

Burdick’s catalogs are now considered collectors’ items, selling for hundreds of dollars. One company even created a baseball card honoring Burdick.

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The marker at Burdick’s grave in Central Square, N.Y., near Syracuse, is as simple as his collection was complex.

A Love of Pictures

In a world with instant communication, it is hard to imagine the popularity of cards in Burdick’s day. Before radio, television and movies with sound, books and newspapers often lacked pictures. Cheap, accessible picture cards were popular not because they were valuable, but because they spurred the imagination.

“Card collecting is primarily an inherited love of pictures,” Burdick told The Herald-American.

Burdick spent his meager savings on cards and saw collecting as its own end. He disdained those who sought to commercialize the hobby like coin and stamp collectors, and he would have been appalled to see how expensive some baseball cards have become. Burdick gave away many duplicates and, incredibly, received from a collector a T206 Honus Wagner card, one of which sold for a record $2.8 million in 2007.

In his catalogs, he often undervalued cards to dampen the market for them. The purity of his interest won him praise from collectors.

“Everyone admired him for doing all this work for no real money,” said George Vrechek, who has written extensively about Burdick. “He was all about collecting it and then gave it all away. It seemed like a gentleman’s pursuit, and he was the leader of the collectors.”

With his health declining, Burdick began in 1947 to make plans to leave his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he hoped it would be permanently accessible. A. Hyatt Mayor, the curator of the museum’s department of prints and illustrated books at the time, agreed to accept it only if Burdick cataloged the more than 306,000 items he had amassed.

Mayor was a social historian at heart and understood that Burdick’s collection provided a window into early American printing and would be a building block for the museum’s American Wing. The inclusion of the baseball cards was “a happy accident,” Spira, the assistant curator, said.

Starting in 1948, Burdick sent his collection a few boxes at a time to the museum, and he traveled to Manhattan to place the cards in albums. He also went to Boston, Chicago and beyond to attend card shows, where he was treated like royalty by his fellow devotees. He handed off The Card Collector’s Bulletin, a newsletter he published, to Charles R. Bray in 1949.

“As many of you know, I have been bothered considerably by chronic arthritis, and in recent years, it has all but precluded any unnecessary activities,” Burdick wrote by way of introducing Bray as his replacement.

Typed across the top of the newsletter in capital letters are the words, “Long Live the King!”

Meticulous to the End

Burdick became a fixture at the museum by the late 1950s, when he relocated to New York City. He moved a small oak desk from his home into a corner of the print department. He used water-soluble glue to paste his collection into 640 albums measuring 12 ½ inches by 15 inches. Burdick photocopied the backs of cards that had vital information and mounted them on facing pages. He took care to ensure the cards were properly grouped and arranged in aesthetically pleasing ways.

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Burdick’s collection at the Metropolitan Museum.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

During his years in New York, he rented a room in a hotel near Madison Avenue and 26th Street. He received cortisone shots that were as painful as his ailments. As his health slipped, Burdick worked more frantically.

“The mounting pile of full scrapbooks drove him to work at an ever more desperate pace,” Mayor wrote. “From time to time, he would say quite impersonally, as though he were talking about a racehorse, ‘I may not make it.’ ”

As part of his research, Burdick visited the New York Public Library, where he had a chance encounter with William MacKay in the late 1950s. Then in his early teens, MacKay was an avid collector who owned a copy of Burdick’s American Card Catalog, which he had bought for the then-princely sum of $2.50.

Accompanied by his father, MacKay had traveled from his home in New Jersey to see the library’s rare card collection. When MacKay asked to see the collection, he was told that Burdick was there. With little coaxing, Burdick met with MacKay, who listened to him talk for two hours on topics like the subtle differences among cards from the 1890s.

“He was a real connoisseur and was very knowledgeable about the graphic processes,” MacKay said in a recent telephone interview. “It was like meeting someone who started the Dewey Decimal System.”

MacKay said Burdick was tall and slender and, despite stiffened hands, moved quickly — like a professional knitter, he said — when handling cards and albums.

“He was friendly, but he wasn’t effusive,” MacKay added. “You could see he was obsessive.”

At 5 p.m. on Jan. 10, 1963, Burdick pasted his last card, rose, worked himself into his coat and announced, “I shan’t be back.” The next day, he checked into a hospital. He died there on March 13 at 63. The inscription on Burdick’s gravestone in Central Square reads, “One of the greatest card collectors of all times.”

The June 1, 1963, edition of the The Card Collector’s Bulletin was a memorial to Burdick. Fellow collectors called him their best friend and their guiding light.

“Perhaps we can compare him to a father who is no longer with us, for he organized our hobby and has left it for us to carry on,” Woodrow Gelman wrote. “Jeff Burdick’s life was like a symphony — it had direction, order and beauty — and it spread its richness to others.”

Lionel Carter, another collector, referred to Burdick as “the Stan Musial of card collectors.” But the comparison did not quite fit.

Burdick seemed to have had little interest in baseball per se and rarely, if ever, attended a game. The cards, it turns out, were his game.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Collection of a Lifetime. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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