Vintage card experts are urged to give me a call …

We’ve undertaken a pretty ambitious editorial project this year at Sports Collectors Digest in trying to bring more stories about vintage cards and sets to our incredibly loyal readership, along with the planned 12-part Mickey Mantle Collectibles Series, an Industry Spotlight feature and a Hobby Royalty special section.

The focus on vintage card sets is planned for every other week, and is already under way with a feature on 1954 Topps Baseball in the Feb. 13 issue; the Mickey Mantle Collectibles Guide mega-series started in the Feb. 6 issue, and Part II, looking at Yoo-Hoo Beverage Co. items and pieces from two tours of Japan that the Yankees participated in in the 1950s, is slated for next week’s issue (March 6).

I don’t often use this space to trumpet editorial plans, but the expanded scope of our effort in 2009 leads me to solicit whatever help I can get. It’s a lot of fun writing about vintage sets, but I have no illusions that I am the ultimate authority on any of them.

I have long understood that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of experts out there connected with virtually every set or individual ballplayer imaginable. The trick is finding them and enlisting whatever help they might like to offer.

So here’s a peek at the schedule in coming months, and if your area of expertise is touched upon and you’d like to contribute, let me know. The idea is that I’d love you to tell me something I don’t know about the 1975 Topps Baseball issue, which is this week’s offering (sorry about the short notice).

For those who’d like a little more lead time, installments on the 1959 Topps Football, 1957 Topps Baseball, 1962 Fleer Basketball and 1972 Topps Baseball are coming up (roughly in that order, every two weeks). The fact that I’ve put all those sets together card-by-card hardly makes me an expert; it merely makes me a fan.

As my old homeroom teacher used to say, “You know who you are.” And I would, too.