How to Build an Awesome-Looking Sports Card Library
By Sal Barry
Sports card collections are always a work in progress caught somewhere between chaos and order, but every card enthusiast has some method of organization that helps them enjoy their collection. Putting my cards into pages and albums, then storing them on bookcases, has helped me tame the chaos. This way, I can quickly find a specific card or set to look at and enjoy; or easily put away a new card when I add it to my collection. A fellow collector once remarked that my collection looked like “The Library of Congress for Hockey Cards,” which I took as a huge compliment. If you have a little floor space in your bedroom, rec room or “man cave,” you too can create your own impressive sports card library.
Here is what you will need:
- One or more sturdy bookcases with shelves at least 12” deep and 12.25” tall
- Trading Card Albums – I prefer 2 inch albums
- 9-Pocket Protective Pages
- 1-Pocket “Document-Size” Protective Pages
- Magazine Backer Boards
- 4” x 6” index cards
- Paper trimmer (or X-Acto knife and ruler)
- Computer and printer
- Find a Sturdy Bookcase or Two
If you are building a library, you will need bookcases for your albums. Bookcases are great since they allow you to utilize vertical space while taking up very little floor space. I use Billy bookcases from IKEA because they are affordable, sturdy, come in different sizes and hold numerous trading card albums. For example, the shorter Billy bookcase (32” wide by 42” high) perfectly fits 12 2-inch BCW albums per shelf and 36 albums total. The taller Billy bookcase (32” wide by 79” high) holds double the amount – 72 2-inch albums, which is enough to store about 38,800 cards in just a 1-foot by 3-foot floor space!
- Page Your Cards
The next step is to put your cards into the albums in a manner that makes sense to you. One friend of mine organizes his cards into pages alphabetically by player name, and even has separate sets of binders for active players, retired players and Hall of Famers. My focus is mainly on complete sets, so I organize my cards by year and brand. Since an album can hold numerous small sets, I put a Magazine Backer Board into a 1-Pocket “Document-Size” Protective Page and use these as dividers between sets. (And if you slide a sell sheet, wrapper or box top into that page, it makes a nice “title page” for that set, too.) I also use a 1-Pocket Page with a Magazine Board as the very first page in every album; this helps keep the 9-Pocket Pages straight when an album is being removed from or put back onto the shelf.
- Label Your Albums
The final step is tedious, but it is what separates the pros from the Joes, because it isn’t a library unless you can easily find what you are looking for. I use index cards to make spine labels for my albums and print them out from my computer. You can download this template, edit it in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, print out on 4” by 6” index cards and use a paper trimmer (or a ruler and an X-Acto knife) to cut down to 4” tall by 1.75” wide. You can also write out the spine labels by hand, but a printer always works best for making small text that is legible and, frankly, will make your library look more impressive, too.
So, how do you organize your collection? Do you store your cards in pages and albums or another way? Leave a comment and let us know.
Sal Barry is the webmaster of the hockey collectibles site PuckJunk.com. Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @puckjunk.
I like to add a bit more color to my binder labels, so I put an image of a nice looking card from the set on there. I try not to duplicate teams or players on spine labels on the same shelves.
That’s a cool idea! Thanks for sharing, and thanks for reading!
Nice looking library! I’ve taken a similar approach but used 3″ binders with the clear outer sleeves; I can then use 1-3 actual cards from the sets within (typically an extra base card of a star player) as the label.
That also sounds really cool! Do you put one card on the front, one on the back and one on the spine? Or all 3 cards on the spine of the album?
Hi Sal, this is great info and wow, that’s a good looking collection! Question re: binders – how many cards can you fit in the 2 inch binder (ie. can a 600 card OPC set fit in one binder)? If not, maybe a 3 inch binder for some of the bigger sets?
Thanks again,
Hello and thank you for the compliments. And sorry for the delay — I am just seeing this message now.
BCW 2-inch binders can hold 60 pages, for 540 total cards. However, you can usually fit up to 70 pages depending on the thickness of the cards. That said, I would not put a 600-card modern OPC set in a 2-inch binder because those cards are printed on thicker stock than the OPC cards from the 1970s and 1980s.
For sets like modern-era OPC, I use 3-inch BCW binders, which can fit up to 90 pages, though I’ve probably been able to fit up to 100 pages. Still, a 3-inch binder can comfortably hold a 600-card OPC set, plus any insert sets that you’d want to put with the base set. And if you want, you could also put some smaller sets with your OPC set, such as 100-card base sets like Ice or SP Authentic.
With the 3-inch binders, I usually put one large set and then one or two small sets to take up any space.
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