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The Hygrade Deluxe Beginner's Complete Baseball Card Collecting Kit

Sort of like those Exhibit postcards from the 1930s and 40s, I really didn't know where these famous binders from the junk wax era came from. I remembered Hygrade was an Ultra Pro-like company that made supplies but were they sold as binders individually or were they a mail order type of thing?

 

They are sized to hold roughly a complete set of cards and mine is currently being used to house my 1972 Topps set that is a work in progress. 



Recently on a visit back home to Minnesota and Wisconsin, I stopped by Bloomington's Three Star Sportscards and stumbled upon where the binders originated from. 


They came in these great Baseball Card Collecting Kit that was everything a novice collector would need to get started managing their collection. 


A quick rundown of the impressive includes the following: 

Baseball card album
20 vinyl pages
25 card holders
Baseball card price guide
Guide of baseball cards
Greatest games and records book
100 baseball cards
40 all-time greats cards
5 rare card reprints

The reverse gives you more specifics on what you will receive inside. 

Three Stars had two sets and priced them at $20 which I think is fair and who knows what the "100 baseball cards" might be. But I had my eye on other things, including a Twins card guide and a Brad Radke bobblehead. 


The image of the price guide on the back seems pretty basic and I wonder if inside you actually received one of the famous Hygrade guides, which claimed to hold the values of cards up to $6,750. 

In my ever-growing collection of old price guides, I have one of those that was purchased at Shopko (R.I.P.) back in the day.



Comments

Bo said…
I had two of those kits! They were great for a new little collector. I had the 1986 and 1987 books.
Fuji said…
I was the recipient of one of those card collecting kits as a kid. And over the years, I've had a few of those binders with card collages on the front cover. Not 100% sure either of these were Hygrade, but part of me regrets not holding onto them... since they're a piece of card collecting history.

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