The 1906 edition of the American Card Catalog baseball card price guide was a pioneering publication that helped establish the emerging market for vintage baseball cards as collectibles. Published just a few years after the start of the modern baseball card collecting hobby in the late 1890s, the 1906 ACC guide was among the earliest attempts to document values for early baseball cards from the late 19th century.
While baseball cards had been included as promotional inserts in cigarettes and other products since the late 1880s, it was not until the late Victorian Era that a small group of dedicated collectors began amassing complete or near-complete sets from the earliest card issues. With no standardized system for tracking scarcity or demand, these early collectors relied on word of mouth, personal collections, and dealer networks to gauge which cards held premium value.
The 1906 ACC price guide was compiled by Joseph Rainey, a Philadelphia-based tobacco product representative and avid baseball card collector. Rainey realized that with interest in the hobby growing, collectors needed a reference book to help value their holdings and guide their want lists. Over the course of 1905, he surveyed America’s leading baseball card dealers, collectors clubs, and fellow hobbyists to compile checklists and value estimates for cards from the 1880s and 1890s.
Some of the key things documented in the 1906 ACC guide included:
Complete checklists and known card issues from 1888 to 1905, with special focus on the early tobacco era issues from 1888-1895 which were already becoming quite rare. This helped collectors identify cards they might have that were previously unknown variants.
Notated estimates on the scarcity of different players and positions. For example, it was noted that shortstops and third basemen tended to be much rarer in the early tobacco issues than other positions due to smaller representation on early baseball rosters.
Pricing guides that assigned qualitative value labels of “common,” “scarce,” or “rare” to different players based on surviving population estimates. For example, superstar players like Cap Anson, Cy Young, and Ed Delahanty were already denoted as “rare” cards even a decade after their original issues.
The guide’s very first documented “premium price” cards – the famous 1889/1890 Goodwin Champions cigarette issues depicting Cap Anson, Mike “King” Kelly, and John Montgomery Ward. These pioneering tobacco era cards were priced at an then-astounding $10 each based on their extreme rarity.
Notations on known printing errors, oddball variations, and condition census rarities that could make otherwise ordinary cards significantly more valuable. For example, the 1894 Mayo Cut Plug card of Amos Rusie with the misspelling “Rusie” was one of the first documented error variants.
Insightful analysis of factors driving scarcity and future value appreciation for early issues. Rainey correctly predicted that as the player pool expanded in the early National League and American League, cards of players from the 1880s and 1890s would continue to dwindle in available quantity and rise in price accordingly.
The 1906 ACC guide helped transform baseball cards from a novelty insertion into a serious collecting category with intrinsic value. By establishing a standardized framework for documentation and pricing, it allowed like-minded collectors to reliably trade, value, and grow their collections for the first time. It also helped fuel greater public interest in the emerging hobby.
Subsequent editions of the ACC guide in 1908 and 1910 would further expand coverage, refine pricing estimates, and incorporate feedback from a growing network of collectors. By World War I, several competing annual and quarterly price guides had emerged to keep up with escalating interest and demand for vintage cards, especially as the player pool from pre-1900 continued shrinking with each passing year.
In today’s ultra-competitive vintage card market, a high-grade example of the pioneering 1906 ACC guide itself regularly commands prices well into the thousands of dollars. It remains one of the most important publications in the development of baseball cards as a mainstream collecting category over a century ago. For historians and serious vintage card collectors, it offers a fascinating window into the hobby’s formative early years when today’s most valuable cards were still in the hands of their original young owners more than a century in the past.
