How do you organize your cards?
Have I been doing things all wrong? Recently, I began organizing my doubles from sets I am trying to collect by team instead of in number order. I started doing this as part of last year's semi-successful Spring Cleaning trade-off. I've kept things going in that regard, and it's helped me find quick fodder for team collectors when I am trying to stuff a padded envelope.
Some recent blog perusings got me thinking: should I be doing this with the rest of my cards? Should I bother keeping my 2002 cards separate from the 2001 cards? Should I still keep them grouped by set, alphabetically, by year and by card number? There's almost no point to me continuing to do this when I don't collect these sets, unless a lot of people have a lot of want lists for me to look through.
I could even take things further and start recycling cards from certain sets and certain years (hello, late '80 and early '90s!) It's kind of hard to do that in the day and age when someone is literally trying to collect every single Tim Wallach card out there. Maybe someone out there really needs a 1990 Topps Bryan Clutterbuck. And some cards might be more recyclable than others just on the environmental side of things. I'm not sure that glossy UV coating is going to pulp up really well.
In any case, I recently unearthed an old box of weirdness that's going to serve as the launching point for this year's Spring Cleaning efforts. More details to come next week, but I'm going to basically list a bunch of things on the blog here in lots for people to claim, and all you have to do is send me a minimum of one card from my want list. (If you're on that spreadsheet that's been going around, you don't even need to send me anything because I know you're good for it.)
Since you asked ... I've recently begun re-organizing my whole baseball collection by team, since I trade with a lot of people who just collect certain teams. Then, once organized that way, said teams will be spread across binders, with duplicates being set aside in a trade box. For my Reds cards, those will be a separate project to go through and weed out duplicates.
ReplyDeleteFor my hockey cards, I've sorted them by team, only for the reason there are some people who collect certain teams. I've picked out the ones I want to keep and those have gone in my hockey binder which I just fill up as I go and is in no particular order, the rest will be donated (unless I can find someone who really wants a bunch of 1990 Topps hockey commons).
Football has it's own small binder as I mainly only collect Bengals cards, and my misc stuff (basketball, UFC, etc.) has it's own small binder as well.
I'm sort of spring clearing/sort of organizing/sort of just boxing cards up to move (again) sometime later this summer. It's a pain. Hopefully this will be the last move for a long time and I can actually organize in a more permanent way.
ReplyDeleteMy problem and it's a serious one, is that I start sorting and organizing, but I don't really finish. That means the next time I start, I'm not really sure what I've done and which boxes to sort and sometimes my method is different so I'm undoing things I've already done. It makes me hate me some me.
ReplyDeleteI had a ton of boxes with no real organization. My OCD took over and I decided I had to get things in order. So I broke down my trade bait in two manners: first, I have base cards that are fr trade to help people who are working on sets; second, I've taken the "hits" and separated them by teams. I have everything listed on my blog so people can see exactly what I have. With that being said, the listing of cards is still a work in progress, so whenever I have a few minutes to sort, I do just that. Then I list the cards on my blog and place them in the appropriate trade box. My own collection needs organizing as well, but I can only do one thing at a time...
ReplyDeleteI would echo PATP dilemma
ReplyDelete