Woody Gelman

I'm in the process of reading Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson, which is a book about baseball card collecting. I plan to do a full post on this later but since I just finished the chapter on Woody Gelman, I wanted to mention it.Gelman helped design the 1952 Topps baseball card and was the chief designer for Topps until the late 1970s. He passed away on February 2, 1978. Even before coming to Topps, he was a great collector of paper ephemera. He collected everything, baseball cards, postcards, greeting cards, matchbooks, magazine advertising. He was a great cataloger. The book describes him as a 'type collector', meaning he tried to obtain at least one card from every set made. Long time readers of this blog may remember that my collecting goal is to obtain at least one card from every set made. I didn't know that I was a 'type collector'.

I also have an interest in old paper. In addition to baseball cards I also collect old post cards. Here I focus on specific cards, those from Cliff Walk RI (my namesake) , and from Drexel University (my old school). I'm also interested in old magazines and some day I'm going to make a post on advertising in the old mags I own.

I'm also a cataloger. In fact, part of the enjoyment of collecting for me is the cataloging of my collection. I spend a lot of time putting cards into my database and I'm also forever tinkering with the database to understand my collection better.

I'd heard of Woody Gelman before, you can hardly be a serious baseball card collector and not have heard of him, but didn't know much about him. Although I never had the mania that Gelman had, he sounds like a guy I could understand.

I am declaring him to be the patron saint of Capewood's Collections.