Over the past couple of weeks, I've made some seriously solid progress on reorganizing my Barry Larkin Collection. Specifically, I've been going through year-by-year (beginning with 1986) and trying to figure out exactly which Barry Larkin cards I have and which I still need. As part of this process, I'm also uploading my Barry Larkin wants and haves to TCDB and I'm scanning all of the cards that I haven't yet written about on my own Barry Larkin Collection series of posts.
So how did I decide to reorganize the binder? Well, I like things in alphabetical order by set - but I found out a long time ago that if I were to get a new Larkin card from a specific year (say a new Bowman Larkin), then I'd have to completely arrange a bunch of pages to fix the alphabetical order...or tack the card onto the last page of the binder and then have everything disorganized.
Luckily, at least for most of the early years of Larkin's career, I have over 50% of the known (to me) Larkin cards. Thus, I decided to make little scraps of paper for every Barry Larkin card that I was missing - and then slot those scraps in my binder at the appropriate points - like so:
Thus, when/if I were to acquire a brand new Larkin card (such as this one from a TCDB trade this week)...
...all I have to do is remove the scrap of paper and slot in the actual card. Easy peasy!
Of course, writing out all those scraps takes me much, much longer than I'd prefer! I've done this for 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1991 so far. I didn't do it for 1990 since I'm still missing 39 out of the 90 different Barry Larkin cards from that.
For those that like numbers, here is how my Barry Larkin Collection stacks up for the years that I've completely sorted thus far:
1986: 2 total cards, I own 1: 50% completion rate
1987: 21 total cards, I own 14: 66.67% completion rate
1988: 28 total cards, I own 11: 39.29% completion rate
1989: 55 total cards, I own 24: 43.64% completion rate
1990: 90 total cards, I own 51: 55.67% completion rate
1991: 67 total cards, I own 37: 55.22% completion rate
It's kind of amazing how many different cards Barry has in the early part of his career (and this was before the era of ten million parallels in each set)! Trust me, those total number of cards by year will eventually become super silly...for example, in 2018 alone Barry had over 440 different cards issued!!
It hasn't come up yet, but I should mention that I've made the decision to try and track down every known Barry Larkin card...but only those for which there are at least 25 copies made. Any card that is serially numbered less than 25 won't be part of my "official" numbers moving forward - I plan to start a second spreadsheet to keep track of the super rare stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm still super happy to acquire such cards but I won't be making it a collecting preference (after all, only one person in the world can own a given one-of-one and if you think you need every single one of those to have a complete collection then you might as well give up before you even start)!
Ambitious! That's exactly what I would like to do with my McGwires, but I doubt I will ever get the energy to make it happen. I also like the call on cutting off ant anything less than 25 copies.
ReplyDeleteA. I've been slowly reorganizing my binders too, but on a much simpler scale. In the midst of redoing my insert binders and organizing them by players, then brands
ReplyDeleteB. I like your 25 copies cutoff. I don't really have a cutoff for my main player pc's... only because I decided long ago that I don't need every single card of Gwynn or any other guy in my collection. That helped me on the financial end of collecting. However in one way we are similar... I'm still happy to acquire any card.
I love seeing how other collectors organize! This certainly looks more efficient than the way I'm doing my player collections, but I don't have the want to anything like this, it's just too much work for me.
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