Surprise #2 finally revealed

I am finally ready to reveal the second surprise I had up my sleeve for the Cardboard History Gallery. I didn't expect it to take as long as it did, but now...finally...it's here! And it's probably going to be my favorite section of the entire website!

This is the last part of the website I plan to reveal. Everything else has either been created or the groundwork has been created. Unlike the Gallery of Hits that was surprise #1, this one I am doing out in the open where anyone can watch me upload as I work, if they so choose.

As you all know if you've been reading my previous postings, cars are everything to me. To me, the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun, it revolves around classic cars. But, health problems prevent me from doing anything with the real cars...so I collect cards instead. I have created a listing of Automotive by Brand, where each car brand gets it's own album, like each person does. And there are a lot of them- 158 different brands. (although some of them are the same brand changing names- like each sports team, I'm keeping it to what it was called at the time.) There have been over 2000 automotive brands in the USA alone, so there's a lot of room for expansion.

Unfortunately, most of the brands have only one or two cards, there has not been a truly decent automotive themed card set since 1996, and even that was only Corvettes. Cars were much more popular to see on cards in the past, and while I don't have a lot of them, I'm always looking for more. From my research the earliest automotive set was issued in 1908, although the earliest in my collection is from 1922.

This, like each team and eventually each person, will be uploaded after the first of each month, depending on what I scan. I do have more that needs to be scanned, this is not a complete listing by any means.

I also want to point out that my knowledge of fire trucks is severely lacking, so I had to go by the captions on the cards in many cases. I don't know if they are entirely accurate. If you see a mistake, please point it out to me. Accuracy is important to me and I've done the best I can do with the knowledge I have...but as I said, I don't have a lot.

Chevrolet has an almost insurmountable lead, with 119 cards in it's album at the time of creation. Chevrolet was very supportive of the trading card hobby from 1990-96, with multiple all-Chevrolet large sets issued...and most of mine still awaiting scans. Once I get them scanned Chevrolet will be over 300 cards. No other brand comes close to that many; Ford has 101 cards currently but a higher percentage of my collection of Ford cards is scanned, they will not top 200 cards. No other brands will even hit the 100 mark.

I did not include race cars- those are in the albums for the people who drove the cars in the Auto Racing section. I also did not include motorcycles, but I have been considering adding them in. I have very few motorcycle cards so to do that would take me literally about 3 minutes. I AM including advertising postcards in the project, like the ones I got from the brands themselves at the New York International Auto Show.

In the creation of the albums for uploading, it is the first time that I have ever determined exactly what automotive brands appear in my collection, and how many of each brand I have, I have never known this before, and the Trading Card Database does not provide this information.

With the high number of albums, it will probably take me a few days to get them all uploaded. I'm going to start now but I don't expect to finish them today as it's at the end of my day. And I'm starting from the bottom alphabetically and moving up. So if you hit the link and see the albums starting with lower letters, just stay tuned, because I'll be working on getting them all posted as soon as I can.