How We Got Here

Post cereal football cards have become an every single day endeavor for the last 17 years, even if it was only checking eBay to see what had been newly listed.  I learned more than I ever thought I would and have had a lot of help along the way.  Maybe ten years ago or so, the idea to do a “book” about Post cereal cards entered my thoughts.  In early 2016, it became evident that it was time to put up or shut up.  The master set I'd been working on for a decade and a half was nearly done and there was plenty of information about that topic alone to make the project worth doing. The thought was to do a book and print them on demand if anybody was interested enough to pay the production costs plus enough to make it worth the trouble.  I own all three of Dan Mabey’s Post American baseball promotion books and thought they were great.  I reference them often.  So the plan became to do a book and I started writing the photographer chapter first.

Immediately, there I was again—back to the circumstantial evidence of who shot the Post football photos.  Circumstantial evidence just didn’t seem good enough to write a conclusion in a book and say with accuracy that it was a specific photographer—books are hard to change once they are in print—even if “print” is self-published.  How do you notify readers who have ordered books about updates?  How do changes physically occur?  Corrected pages only?  How many copies do you have to send out?  Is it fair to charge somebody for what they should have already paid for?  Too many questions to be uncertain about the photographer conclusions.  So I went searching one last time for something that would, at least in my mind, be black and white that said it was so-and-so. The proverbial smoking gun. 

The search also told me that I didn’t want to answer the questions posed in the previous paragraph.  I would not get rich off a book and probably would have felt like it was inadequate when it was finished.  And what better medium to share images than via the web on a computer?  So here’s the Post cereal photographer.  If it’s wrong, show me where and why and I’ll be glad to change it.  Ah, the beauty of the website, once again.