Pre-War Cards Site Expansion Announcement

Posted on July 5, 2019 by Pre-War Cards

Coming soon, the site is going to grow a bit more

The last time I announced an expansion of the site, it was about adding more sports. But this expansion is a little different.

Since I created the site, I’ve been adamant about my stance of what exactly constitutes a pre-war card. The definition of such a card on this site is any card produced prior to 1940. My logic for that has always been quite simple and is explained in better detail here.

Despite some arguments against that, to date, I’ve still never heard of a single legitimate reason to categorize other, later cards into the pre-war basket. Most ‘reasons’ have typically ranged from ‘Come on, it just makes sense’ to ‘Goudey and Play Ball sets belong together’ to ‘Everyone else does it differently.’ None of those have really moved the needle much for me. While conflicts began earlier and a precise start date can be debated, the most common start date for World War II has been deemed as 1939. Thus, a card produced during a war shouldn’t be called a pre-war card. ‘Pre’ indicates ‘before,’ after all, not ‘during.’ Even some 1939 cards technically shouldn’t count but since exact months of production aren’t often known, eliminating those cards from the discussion would be an unnecessary splitting of hairs.

So we’re left with an odd situation. We’ve got pre-war cards, post-war cards, and cards produced during the war. What do we do with those cards from the war era? Essentially, I believe they should be called war-time cards and in a separate classification altogether, if we’re being accurate. However, I also understand the conundrum collectors are in that want information on those cards only to come here and not find it. That is particularly true of popular issues such as Goudey and Play Ball cards, that technically overlap my definition of eras since they were both produced up to 1941.

As a ‘fix’ to that, of sorts, I will be expanding the site to include cards produced through 1945, the end of World War II.

Now, that doesn’t mean my definition of a pre-war card is changing, obviously. I’ll die on the pre-1940 hill if I must. But it does mean the site is going to be a little more inclusive of other sets during the war because I’ve been asked by a lot of readers about including them. Their addition would improve the site and anything that does that is a good idea in my mind.

Logistically, while I’ll only be adding six years of cards, as you can imagine, this will still be a bit of an undertaking. While there aren’t a ton of baseball cards produced during that time, when you take all of the other sports into consideration, it makes for significantly more work. And in addition to the sets, I’ll obviously be writing individual articles to include some more specific discussion on those sets, too.

As usual, I’ll be working within a pretty aggressive timeframe, which is generally how I like to accomplish things. The good news is that in anticipation of this decision, I’ve already long since begun work on the additions. I plan on trying to accomplish this in the next month or so but it could easily drag on longer. However, you should start to see set listings for sets from those years begin to pop up and I wanted to explain why before that happened.

Now, onward towards the discussion of 1941 Goudey, 1940 Bruguera, and such.