At the end of Febraury 2026 it is likely that around $10 million will be spent on two 120-year-old baseball cards.
And, in the process, the somewhat unsung work of a New York electrician will have another day in the sun.
The Wagner
Perhaps the most famous card in sports trading card history is up for sale at Goldin and Heritage at the end of this month.
Each card, issued in around 1910, is quite badly damaged by sports card standards.
And each is expected to sell for more than $3 million.
And will probably sell for much more.
And, the headlines will be filled with the T206.
What’s a T206?
A T206 is an American Tobacco Company card.
But the name doesn’t come from that company, which was eventually split up to break a potential monopoly.
T206 is a classification given to the card set by a collector called Jefferson R Burdick, who is one of the unsung heroes of collecting.
An ordinary American life
In 1900, Central Square, New York (a still-small village in the State rather than an address in the city) was born Jefferson Burdick.
Burdick was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he never became rich or famous. His profession is usually listed as electrician.
But he had a passion.
To bring some colour to his rural life, young Jefferson started collecting cards.
Central Square station, not to be mistaken for Grand Central Station. The village is still a rural backwater today.
And he did it at a great time for the hobby.
That great T206 set was issued from 1909 to 1911.
The industrial revolution had produced what we’d now recognise as a consumer culture, and America was its beating heart.
Collecting cards are marketing. They were generally free gifts. Their origin is as a maximalist attempt to get advertising onto every surface, including cards used to stiffen cigarette packets.
Jefferson didn’t smoke himself, but he did reportedly badger his dad into switching brands so he could snag more, different cards.
Although he did go to college for most of his working life he was an electrician.
And as he started to make his way in the world he put aside the things of childhood, including his card collection.
A passion reborn
But in 1933 he started collecting again. He had started to suffer from the arthritis that would bother him for the rest of his life.
Frankly, it seems his work was unfilling, his illness was painful, and a passion that reminded him of happier times was a tonic for him.
A 1933 Goudey baseball card. A beautiful, colourful example Jefferson will have admired.
Jefferson never made a lot of money. He is recorded as a lodger, earning just over $1,000 a year in 1940. What money he could spare though went on cards.
And by 1940, it was also being spent on card cataloguing.
Because he wanted to share the joy card collecting bought to him with others. Burdick was a genuine evangelist for his hobby.
The most important book in the history of cards
From 1937 Burdick had a second life. As the writer and publisher of the Card Collector’s Bulletin.
It’s this publication that earns Burdick the title, the Father of Card Collecting. Some of its classifications are still in use today.
Making card collecting respectable
A catalogue made card collecting a legitimate and serious study of Americana.
He started out writing short pieces for Hobbies magazine from 1935.
He’s generally regarded as the first person to treat trading cards as worthy of the treatment given to stamps, coins, antiques and so on.
Looking for more a more expansive venue for his writing he started to go it alone.
In fact, he did what many a budding enthusiast does today, and started a newsletter.
And so, in January 1937, the Card Collectors Bulletin (he later added an apostrophe) went out to a list of 55 of Burdick’s contacts. Some were dealers, some had written in response to his Hobbies articles, some were other collectors he knew.
Twenty-five recipients agreed to pay for future issues.
In them, Burdick started to compile as complete a catalogue as he could of collecting cards.
He was a general interest collector, buying not just baseball or sports cards, but cards covering all subject matters.
And he was in it for the love of the cards, writing that paying as much as $1 for a card would surely wipe the hobby out.
We also know that he loved completeness, and contrary to the advice he gave to his readers, he collected his own cards glued into albums to ensure sets could not be separated.
A 1933 card celebrating the Chicago World's Fair. Jefferson collected across subject matters and cherished the cards themselves. Image Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The roots of a great volume
A promised four issues of his bulletin for subscribers turned into 26 years worth of them.
And in 1939 he produced the first edition of what became The American Card Catalog (ACC), using the classification system that gives us the T206.
The United States Card Collectors Catalog was the name for the first publication, changing to the ACC for 1946, 1953 and 1960 editions.
The first edition is itself a treasured collectors item, with a print run of just 500. One sold for over $5,000 last summer.
Until 1951 - which is considered a transitional year into a new age of card collecting - he had the field to himself.
The 1952 Topps set marked a new era in card collecting.
Jefferson’s classifications, which he evolved as the card market changed and expanded, have stuck.
The system is simple and based around the product with which the cards were given away, with. Simple letter prefixes denote categories (these were added after the first edition), and numbers define sets.
Duke's cigarettes. The company was at the heart of the American Tobacco Company, a consortium that was eventually broken up by the US government as a monopoly. They printed many of the great trading cards.
The full catalogue lists:
N cards - 19th-century tobacco, for example, N29 Allen & Ginter 1888 cards.
D Cards - bread and bakery, for example, D310 Pacific Coast Biscuit 1911 cards.
F Cards - food, ice cream & dairy, F50 Yuengling's Ice Cream 1928 cards.
R Cards - gum, for example, R414-6 Topps 1952 cards.
T Cards - 20th-century tobacco, for example T206, 1909-11, white borders cards.
W cards - strip Cards and exhibits, for example, W603 Sports Exchange 1946-49
WG cards - game cards, for example, WG4 polo ground card game.
V cards and C cards - non-United States cards for example, C56, 1910-11 Imperial Tobacco Canadian hockey cards
You’ll see many of these numbers in use in auction catalogues and on trading sites today.
A T201 stamped by Burdick. Although he donated a huge collection to the nation, he traded throughout his collecting career and his cards do come to market.
There is no brand associated with the 20th-century tobacco cards, because of the virtual monopoly of the American Tobacco Company. For example, the famous T206 Honus Wagner card comes with as many as 16 different designs on its reverse promoting the company’s various marques.
A passion and an obsession
Today’s card collectors love Burdick and acknowledge their debt to him. Experts look at his valuations - despite his worry about high prices - as good relative assessments of modern card values.
It’s also pretty clear form Burdick’s own writing and behaviour that he really loved collecting - and classifying - for the sake of it.
Important to him too was the chance to contact other collectors, to build a community. You can easily see him running a bulletin board then a forum then a social media page for cards in this day and age.
Logan Paul with his double world-record-setting Pokemon card. A very different feeling, but these collectors are heirs to the Burdick era.
In his final bulletin for collectors he wrote: “Beginning collectors soon find that collecting these cards is quite different from some hobbies. It is real collecting. There are no dealers with huge stocks ready to supply complete sets of anything desired. Usually such sets are built up a bit at a time and require considerable search and expense. These cards are a type of Americana which is fast becoming scarce.”
The market in cards was vast and chaotic, and Burdick’s catalogue is not complete by any means, but it is the most complete record of its era.
The fate of the Burdick Collection
True to his selfless soul, Burdick donated his own beloved card collection to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as “a national collection belonging to everybody.”
He then spent considerable time working on explanatory material and a full catalague of the collection. He died just as it was finished in 1963.
Burduck left more than 300,000 cards to the nation, and you can see a small number of them in the museum to this day.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York has digitised some of Burdick's collection and you can view much of it online. Image by Freyda Spira, courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Only the National Baseball Hall of Fame has a bigger baseball care collection.
People like Jefferson Burdick are the lifeblood of collecting and we all owe a debt to them.
Collecting today
We are the world’s largest holder of rare collectibles by value.
