How do you organize your card collection?
In this story:
When talking to sports card collectors, there seems to be one common theme in what or how they collect and that's PASSION! In a perfect world, we'd all be able to display our collection to show off to friends or family when they visit, but most of us can only do that for a fraction of the collection itself.
The "how" you collect can dictate how you ultimately organize and display your collection. I have 58 of the 99 2012 Exquisite Michael Egnew Autographed rookies, but there's no simple way for me to display them, hence they get to sit in a 3 row box in a closet, as do the other Mizzou Tigers alumni that I like to hoard in large quantities.
How I organize has evolved with what I collect, in the early days, it was as simple as having some binders with 9 pocket pages, still popular today for the ease in which you can view your favorite cards.
Traits of an ideal "local card shop"
For what I collect(Mizzou alumni across all sports, and local athletes), I simply organize my collection by player. Brad Smith has a couple of boxes, Nick Bolton has a box, Tyron Woodley has part of a box, shared with Ben Askren, Brady Cook and Luther Burden III have the beginning of a box, etc. In this case the boxes I'm referring to are 3200 ct boxes, as they fit my shelving perfectly. When we built our home a couple of years ago, about the only thing I got to have a say in was my storage area, a large walk in closet, customized to hold the weight of multiple 3200 ct boxes.
For the non-PC (personal collection) portion of my collection, everything ultimately will find a home in a box, separated by sport, and then by rookie cards, then by superstars, then by inserts. Like a lot of collectors, I have more cards that I use to trade or sell than are actually in my PC, and that inventory is always being churned through. When I buy a collection, it often throws a wrench in how I'm able to organize it, depending on how long I plan to keep it. Thankfully I've sold on eBay since 1998, so I have an eBay store where I sell off what I don't want.
Organizing the eBay portion is somewhat easy, as it only takes up a box or two, so it can be readily available to package and get out in the mail. Sadly, this is where I'm probably most organized, as I force myself to be, in the interest of customer service. I'm constantly dealing with cards, so there's a steady flow of cardboard coming through my man cave, and it initially starts off looking like the photo at the top of this article, where it goes from there depends on what the intent is. My wife will rarely come to my 'card room', as she says it gives her heart palpitations, with the disorganized aspect (in her opinion), but I can generally find whatever I'm looking for quickly, much to her surprise.
Let's be real here too, can you really "organize" 300,000+ sports cards? I do my best, but even I can get overwhelmed! Then there's the much forgotten aspect of organizing your collection....buying all the supplies. There's almost no worse feeling than being excited to go to your card shop of choice and realizing you need to drop another $50 for supplies, in addition to hunting for your next addition to your collection.
Where organization can get really tricky is the different box types and sizes. If you use a box or two for storing cards in one touch holders and another few where you store top loaded cards and then another one that you're storing graded cards in, you'd better hope you were good at Tetris!
Bottom line, organizing your collection can be just as personal as what and how you collect, there isn't a right answer for everyone, just the right one for you!
I ripped my first pack of cards at 6 years old and pulled a 1977 Topps Tony Dorsett rookie, a huge bonus in that I was a Cowboys fan. I then began to build team sets of my favorite teams. As I grew older, the nuances of collecting and beginning to invest engulfed me. As a sports junkie, cards became a natural conduit to feed my passion for collecting and investing in the stars I saw on TV and read about in box scores. While in high school, I began to set up at card shows and reinvest profits into more cards, for both the PC and additional inventory. Fast forward to the present day, I'd like to think I have one of the biggest Mizzou alumni collections in the world, collecting across any sport where I can find a Mizzou alum on cardboard(not always an easy task to find). I could never get any of my 3 daughters to share the hobby with me, but as a new "Pops", I can't wait to share the hobby with my grandson, he just doesn't know it yet!