Jefferson Burdick

Jefferson R. Burdick (1900–1963) was an American electrician and a collector of printed ephemera, including postcards, posters, cigar bands, and other types of printed materials dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1960s. He is best known for collecting trading and baseball cards in The American Card Catalog, otherwise known as the ACC.

Burdick is often considered to be the greatest card collector in history, and has been called "The Father of Card Collecting."

Biography

Early life He was born in Central Square, New York in 1900. Growing up on a farm, Burdick began collecting cards from soda and tobacco companies as a child, and asked his father to smoke different cigarette brands so he could collect them all.

Return to collection and publications Burdick became interested in collecting again in 1933, when he began amassing cards and stamps in earnest. Beginning in 1937, he published a Card Collectors Bulletin. He established his system of cataloguing cards in the CCB.

By 1940, Burdick was living as a lodger with a Syracuse family and earned a salary of $1,065 per year as an assembler at Crouse-Hinds Company. Despite his meager wages, he continued to spend the majority of his earnings on publishing his bulletins and growing his collection.

The Burdick Collection The Jefferson R. Burdick collection is the second largest public collection of baseball cards, behind only that of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. A small part of the collection is on display at the museum on the first floor of the American Wing. Burdick’s donation to the museum included over 300,000 items; however, only a small percentage of the items donated by Burdick were baseball cards.

The Burdick system is still widely used today by collectors and dealers of baseball memorabilia. The famed T206 baseball card set received its popularized name from the set's designation in the ACC. Many other baseball card sets are popularly known by their ACC designation, including: T205, E93, M116 and R313.