Alladan Flinn and Nick Jarman Announce Forthcoming Book Cardboard Kings: The History of Trading Cards

Alladan Flinn, founder of Based Trading Cards, and Nick Jarman, Founder and CEO of the Certified Trading Card Association (CTCA), have announced their forthcoming book, Cardboard Kings: The History of Trading Cards. Scheduled for release during the 2026 holiday season, the book traces more than 150 years of trading-card history, from early trade cards and printing innovation to sports cards, TCGs, pop culture collectibles, grading, modern hobby culture and the collector economy.

As an early preview, readers can now get a first look at the opening chapter, “A World Few People Ever Saw,” which can be read below. The chapter explores the origins of the trading-card space, including the monochromatic world of the 19th century, the imagination gap, and the psychological roots of scrapbooking, setting the stage for a larger story about how trading cards became one of the most enduring and influential collectible formats in the world.

Chapter 1 - A World Few People Ever Saw

Imagine with me, just for a second, what it was actually like to live back in the 1800s.

We live in an era of absolute information overload. Today, you can sit on your couch in a small farming town in the Midwest, pull a supercomputer out of your pocket, and instantly watch a street performer in Tokyo. You can take a high definition virtual tour of the pyramids of Egypt or live stream a baseball game happening halfway across the world. If you want to see what a tiger looks like, it takes exactly three seconds and a search engine.

For the overwhelming majority of human history, none of that existed.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the world beyond one's own hometown often felt more imagined than real. Most people lived incredibly small lives geographically speaking. A farmer in rural America, a laborer in England, or a merchant in Germany might live their entire lives without ever traveling farther than a few dozen miles from their birthplace. The horizon was the absolute limit of their reality.

The world beyond their immediate surroundings was largely built through stories, rumors, and word of mouth. For many everyday people, places like Paris, London, Cairo, or Beijing felt almost mythical. Even major historical events or political shifts often arrived as fragments of information weeks or months after they actually happened.

To truly understand the origins of the trading card hobby, we must first understand this reality. Trading cards were not originally created to become financial assets. They weren't created to be sealed in sonically welded plastic slabs, and they certainly weren't manufactured for investors to flip for a profit. They emerged because people desperately wanted something much more basic: connection.

They wanted a connection to places they would never visit. They wanted a connection to people they would never meet.

Modern society suffers from information fatigue, but back then, information scarcity defined daily life. To grasp the significance of a simple piece of printed cardboard, you have to understand the concept of visual starvation. We live in a world where we are bombarded with thousands of high resolution images every single day, from billboards to social media feeds to television commercials. But in the early 1800s, visual imagery itself was a precious commodity.

Think about the stark, monochromatic reality of a nineteenth century working class home. Today, we take for granted that we can hang posters, frame photographs, or display vibrant art on our walls. Back then, art was fiercely guarded behind a massive class divide. The wealthy elite lived in sprawling estates decorated with massive oil paintings, private family portraits, and vast libraries filled with illustrated encyclopedias. They held a complete monopoly on visual culture.

For the working class, however, walls were entirely bare. A child growing up in a rural farmhouse or a crowded industrial city tenement had likely never seen an elephant. Not in person, and not in a photograph. Perhaps they had only seen a rough, black and white illustration in a book, and that was only if their family was wealthy enough to own books at all. They might hear stories from traveling merchants about the massive, sprawling cities of Europe, but they struggled to imagine what those cobblestone streets and towering cathedrals actually looked like.

Because of this visual starvation, images mattered deeply. When a printed picture made its way into a working class household, it was treated like a sacred artifact. People saved it. They studied it. They displayed it on their mantles and passed it around to their neighbors. What may seem completely insignificant to us now, like a simple drawing of a foreign flag, an exotic bird, or a steam locomotive, could feel extraordinary to them.

An illustrated image of a foreign city was not merely entertainment. It was literal transportation. It was a window into a world they were otherwise blind to. It democratized art, taking it out of the mansions of the elite and placing it directly into the hands of the everyday person.

Long before the first baseball player was ever printed on a tobacco stiffener, people were already actively collecting pictures. During the 1700s and early 1800s, Europe and parts of North America experienced significant advancements in printing technology. Improvements in engraving, etching, and woodblock printing made illustrated materials slightly more accessible to the public than ever before.

As a result, an overlooked but critically important development occurred in the culture: the rise of scrapbooks and personal collections.

Decades before anyone had ever heard of a trading card, Victorian households became obsessed with gathering ephemera. They increasingly kept heavy, leather bound albums filled with newspaper clippings, decorative paper scraps, calling cards, and visual keepsakes. Families would sit around the parlor fire in the evenings, meticulously pasting these items onto the thick pages of their books. This was a massive social pastime. It was the original binder culture.

If you look closely at this era, it proves a fundamental point about our hobby: the desire to collect is baked into human DNA. A Victorian child saving illustrated animal prints and gluing them into an album in the 1840s was acting on the exact same psychological impulse as a modern collector carefully organizing base cards, inserts, and refractors into a nine pocket Ultra Pro page today.

There is something deeply human about gathering items that feel meaningful, organizing them, and claiming ownership over a small, curated piece of the world. The physical objects have changed over the centuries. Human behavior did not.

Today, the trading card industry is almost exclusively viewed through the lens of money. What is it worth? What grade did it get? What is the pop count? Will it go up in value? These questions dominate our modern conversations, our podcasts, and our conventions. We have trained an entire generation of collectors to look at a piece of cardboard and immediately calculate its return on investment.

But the earliest roots of collecting had absolutely nothing to do with financial value. They were rooted entirely in emotional value.

These early collections did not begin as speculation. They began as storytelling. They began as pure curiosity. When a Victorian family preserved an illustration of a historical figure or a distant landscape, they were not looking to flip it to another collector for a profit. They were not hunting for a short print or worrying about secondary market demand. They kept it because it sparked wonder. They kept it because it made their world feel just a little bit bigger.

Despite this massive, growing public interest in collecting images, there remained one major limitation preventing the hobby from truly exploding: technological friction.

While the printing press had made books and newspapers widely available, printing high quality, colored images remained an incredibly laborious and expensive process. Early illustrations had to be carved into woodblocks or etched into metal plates. If a publisher wanted that image to have color, it usually had to be painted by hand, one single page at a time. This meant that high quality, multi-colored illustrated materials remained relatively expensive to produce. There was not yet a standardized, affordable format capable of reaching ordinary, working class consumers at a massive scale.

That dynamic was about to change.

A technological revolution was brewing that would finally allow full color images to be mass produced cheaply and efficiently. But ironically, the next major leap toward the trading cards we know and love would not come from artists, museums, or educators trying to share the beauty of the world. It would come from ambitious businessmen trying to solve a very simple, frustrating problem.

How do you get a customer to remember you after they leave your store?

The answer to that single question would not just create corporate brand loyalty. It would accidentally invent the complete set, the numbered series, and the psychological thrill of the chase.

Check back soon over at www.historyoftradingcards.com and over at The CTCA online for news on the book release and pre-order information.