When the phenomenon of jaw-dropping prices for tiny pieces of cardboard started to take hold in the hobby in the 1970s, adults were pretty uniformly startled to learn that those Topps and Bowman cards from their childhood years were being frantically sought by collectors.
This was the period when ardent collectors were supposedly “coming out of the closet,” an unironic nod to the idea that you could continue to accumulate baseball cards beyond your adolescence because now they were worth real money and thus an acceptable pastime for adults.
For most serious collectors at the time, this was sort of like buying Playboy Magazine for the articles: really, we continued collecting because we simply liked the cards. The money thing was just a handy cover story.
This grand cultural shift seemed to take place organically, but there were dozens of competing newsletters and magazines that helped to provide an impetus for
