Are Playing Cards a Good Investment?

Once a collector has parted with some serious money (and I suspect that covers most of our membership), it becomes natural to wonder if this money is gone for good or whether our cards might hold some or all of their value? Indeed, is it even possible that they might some day become worth more than we paid?

The first motivation for looking into all this came from a note by Sylvia Mann with the title “Another Sale of a different era”, in The Journal of The Playing Card Society, Volume 4 No. 3, p 35, from February 1976. There she says

“Recently, there came into my hands the sale catalogue of the sale of the duplicates from Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s collection at Sotheby’s on 1st and 2nd May, 1896, prices for those lots sold on the second day being written in the margin.”

Lady Charlotte Schreiber is well known, to British collectors at least, as one of the very first serious collectors of playing cards in Victorian Britain. Her collection is described in a massive three volume catalogue and now lives in the British Museum.

Some of the prices from Sylvia Mann’s note

The challenge now is to find realistic modern-day prices for the same cards. In fact, we are most unlikely to find the cards that are literally the same ones and we cannot tell if the cards in the two sales are in the same condition.

Nevertheless, if we find a reasonable number of examples we can hope to find a balance of items where the cards sold recently average out at a similar condition to those sold in 1896.

In modern auctions (the examples are from the sales of major collections - Kaplan, Hawes and Ortiz-Patino, at various dates 2006-2017), we find eleven examples matching nine entries from the 1896 listing.

One example will show how the calculation proceeds: the pack shown is the Olivatte transformation, the first item on the 1896 list, shown with two prices £1 5s and £1 6s. The ‘5s’ and ‘6s’ means five and six of the old shillings, which were twenty to the pound, so the two prices in decimal notation become £1.25 and £1.30.

We see in the image above that this example sold for US$2,800 in May 2017. Our first step is to convert this US dollar sale price to £2,174 – using the 2017 exchange rate of 1.2878 dollars to the pound.

It remains to compare a price of £1.25 (or £1.30) in 1896 with the sale for £2,174 in 2017. The purchasing power of the dollar has been eroded by inflation so we know that £1.25 was worth more in 1896 than it would be now. To quantify this, we conventionally use an index of consumer prices, a number that tracks the price of a mixed selection of goods in a standardised ‘basket’.

If you would like to know the technical terms in economics and finance, we begin with ‘nominal’ prices, meaning prices as they were named and specified at the time. Dividing these by the consumer price index turns these into ‘real’ prices. These represent a better comparator over time.

We use the website of economist Robert Shiller at Yale, and find the 1896 index is 8.5, the 2017 index is 1071.9, and so the average consumer price increase is a factor of 126. Dividing this out of the final price, the final real price is 13.8 times the initial real price. This equates to an average annual gain of 2.2% real.

Taking all the packs we found, and summarising:

Price (Adj.)	Pack Title	Real Annual Gain
£576	Popish Plot	1.6%
£158	Olivatte	2.2%
£184	Gumpennberg Tarot	2.6%
£95	Pasquin’s Windkaart	2.6%
£34	Jeu de la guerre	2.9%
£14	Gassmann Tarot	3.2%
£71	Mortier’s Maps	4.8%
£14	Vandenborre Tarot	4.9%
Average		3.1%

The Olivatte result uses the average of two 1896 prices, the Gumpennberg uses the average of two 2006 prices. These have been sorted on the annual percentage gains, and note how the initial prices are high for the cards with subsequently low returns and vice-versa. This suggests a clear recommendation: be sensitive to the price paid before investing - a careful approach rather than thinking of any packs as a special “must-have” at any cost.

The cards in the 1896 sale were all rather ‘fancy’ and certainly nothing merely standard.

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Our next investigation aims to balance that. We have prices of the full range of United States cards from Marshall Field, circa 1885-86.

The prices above are for a dozen packs and for a gross (12 dozen or 144 packs). We take these as wholesale prices and we then have to apply some kind of mark-up for the collector. If we understate the purchase price, we will overstate the gains afterwards.

We have matched entries here with items from (recent) club auctions like the example shown.

Above: Tigers #101 playing cards, c.1891, rare U.S. Printing Co. issue with darker Joker tone and slight bending, sold for a minimum of $275.

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The analysis makes the inflation adjustment over a long period of time just as we did before. In the Marshall Field catalogue we see that Tigers 101 cost 5.2¢ (62.5¢ for 12) IN 1885-86. We assume a mark-up of 50%, so the retail value is 7.8¢. Allowing for inflation this is equivalent to a modern $2.91. This is a very sensible result for a single pack of standard cards. We see that the c1891 pack in the 2018 auction sold for $425, a gain of 146 times over the $2.91 equivalent price, or a 3.8% annual gain over 133 years.

We repeat this exercise for all the examples we can find in recent auctions and we find:

Card Type	Adjusted Price	Club Sale	Annual Gain
Congress	$32.74	$260	1.6%
Treasury	$29.41	$170	1.3%
Treasury ‘89	$28.92	$240	1.6%
Army Navy	$20.64	$150	1.5%
Sportsman	$14.70	$220	2.0%
Capitol	$9.80	$185	2.2%
Texan 45	$8.14	$350	2.9%
Bicycle	$7.02	$225	2.6%
Tigers 101	$2.91	$425	3.8%
Average annual gain	2.2%

Here the cards are in price order with the most expensive first, so again the bigger gains are made by the cards that were initially cheap - even though these were seen as lower quality.

Here the average gains (2.2% pa) are similar to before and just a little lower (3.1% pa earlier).

We have so far compared prices at two different times. It is also possible to infer something about the pricing of older versus newer cards from a single snapshot at one date. For this investigation we have used the Hochman Price Guide - the 2014 supplement to the Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards by Tom and Judy Dawson. We have taken only the ‘mint’ prices because the other conditions are almost exactly proportional (eg prices for good condition are mostly all half the mint).

We show (next column) a set of entries, and we have added dates for each set of cards by hand.

The analysis then consists of taking all the standard sets and removing a few that are clearly very different (such as the expensive transformations and illuminated sets). That done, we can average values of the cards according to age.

We already knew older cards tend to cost more; this analysis enables us to quantify this at 3.4% price growth per year.

It is less clear what is changing here. We are interpreting all the differences as being age related. However, it could be that the price of the pre-1880 cards for example also represent a ‘golden era’. As modern cards age they may get more valuable but not so much as the golden era cards.

We conclude with some general advice - not least that the industry standard health warning applies ‘the past may not be a good guide to the future’. However, we did note reasons why cards could gain more than inflation - the genuine wastage rate of cards including antique cards plus demographics of a population with growing leisure and disposable income.

If we take 2-3% annual gain as an average - with absolutely no guarantees - we can reasonably hope to retain and slowly gain value, but equity investments are better for long-term finances.