Coca-Cola 600

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting the 600th addition to the Sanborn R-series set

Another (artificial) milepost was passed this week with the acquisition of Sanborn R-series real-photo postcard R-1305, a view of the switchbacks heading down to Glen Haven.

This is now the 600th different Sanborn postcard from the high number (inventory numbers above R-750) R-series added to the collection, a not particularly relevant accomplishment in light of the fact Sanborn produced a total of 1034 different high-number views of the Estes Park region between 1933 and 1956, so 600 doesn't even equate to a nice round percentage like 60%, but still worth noting, as this has now become without question the third-largest collection of different R-series postcards on the planet, behind only the master set at Sanborn headquarters in Commerce City (which was obviously not assembled years later on the open market, so is kind of an unfair competitor), and the private collection of Denver-based collector Bobbie Heisterkamp, whose actual count of R-series RPPCs is unknown (because her list includes inventory numbers which don't exist, but in fairness, these inventory numbers are often difficult if not impossible to read unless you have access to the negatives used to produce them), but is larger than 600 based on how many of the particularly rare postcards in the R-series are in her collection.  (Some of Sanborn's postcards were so popular he ended up printing thousands of copies of them - Decades later, these views are still easy to find on Ebay or at specialized postcard shows and remain relatively inexpensive, so any serious collector quickly fills all of these holes.  However, some of Sanborn's postcards were so unpopular at the time they were never re-ordered, so if an initial print run was 25, this ended up being the total print run, that is, the total number of that particular view ever produced.  As most postcards sent through the mail in the 1930s and 1940s were either quickly or eventually thrown away (although, admittedly, the real-photo postcards had slightly more prestige, but pale in comparison to color postcards, so any family descendant coming across these in a drawer in this century without knowledge of the value of postcards would likely throw them away), it is virtually impossible to find any of these "ultra-rare" postcards on the open market.  It is not that they are "imprisoned" in people's collections and rarely come up for sale or auction.  They just don't exist.  Based simply on postcards used as illustrations in her book "Shared Memories", Bobbie Heisterkamp has a larger number of rare and ultra-rare R-series Sanborns than anyone else, and it thus follows that she has the largest total number of different R-series postcards, as a complete or near complete set of "commons" underlying these rare postcards is a fairly non-controversial given.)

When Harold Sanborn first began placing serially-advancing inventory numbers of the front of his postcards, the subject matter/geographic areas were grouped in obvious blocks of 100 (for example, in the N-series, views of Northern Colorado, postcards N-1 through N-99 were from Longmont and Fort Lupton, postcards N-100 to N-199 were from Greeley, and postcards N-200 to N-299 from Fort Collins - as another example, in the R-series, although this "rule" tends to fall apart more quickly, R-1 to R-99 was generally Big Thompson Canyon, with R-100 to R-199 generally St. Vrain Canyon), so it makes some historic sense for collectors to keep track of their Sanborns in blocks of 100.  But more generally, because these sets are so large (Sanborn's Wyoming series RPPC set comprises nearly 2500 different postcards), it makes for easier bookkeeping if lists are chunked, and postcards organized, in some workable quantity, thus the widespread division into hundreds among Sanborn collectors (which was likely arrived at independently hundreds of times over, since hard-core Sanborn collectors tend not to vacation or even speak with one another).

In this way, if there was a Guinness book of records for Sanborns, it becomes obvious that Bill Berry once held (and may still hold, unless Bobbie Heisterkamp has some additional R-800s Bill didn't find - Bobbie eventually acquired Bill's collection) the record for the R-800 Sanborns, with 77 of the potentially 100 different postcards between R-800 and R-899 in his collection.  (To full appreciate the degree of difficulty this represents, the R-800 cluster includes 24 "incredibly difficult to find" and 7 "virtually impossible to find" postcards, so even a lifelong collector would be lucky to crack the 70 mark in the R-800 series, and when Bill stopped, at most 7 years in, he was instead approaching 80 of the 100 different views.  As another example, until recently I had yet to broach the 70% mark in any of the 11 different R-series hundreds, but finally reached 70 different R-1500 postcards a few months back, with no guarantee I will find postcard 71 in the R-1500 series before I die).  Once you've acquired the Sanborns that are easy to find, the ones everyone has in their collections, any particular rare one (500 or less printed over the life of the postcard) turns up on Ebay or the other auction or fixed-price sites at best once a year (with diligent daily searches using normal spellings, typical misspellings, and generic single-word searches like "Colorado" (essentially indiscriminatory fishing nets), because not every seller does a good job of listing their product), more often less frequently than once a decade (although admittedly, Ebay hasn't been around long enough for these observations to carry any statistical weight).  And since every rare postcard as it appears is likely to be absent from every person's collection, competition is fierce.  Sharks dropped into a pond of Furr's Fresh Buffet regulars fierce.

Such is the situation with high-number Sanborns.  There are also low-number Sanborns, which I tend to avoid, because they are older (likely first produced nearly a century ago) and have no corresponding negatives or saved production records, so dealers tend to charge more for them simply because they can.  Coincidentally, around the same time the odometer turned from 599 to 600 on the high-number R-series RPPCs, I found a low-number R on the market which pushed my total to 200 (sort of:  The low-number R-series is a mess, because Sanborn often assigned the same number to two distinctly different views, so I don't know, for example, if I own an R-13 of the Big Thompson Canyon and an R-13 of Bear Lake if I should count this once or twice).  This achievement is almost too embarrassing to mention, as there are at least 500 different low-series R-series RPPCs, not even counting the double and possibly triple uses of the same number for different cards.  200 different low-number R-series Sanborns represents at best 40% completion.  

One of my strong beliefs is that no individual or institution, no matter how hard they try or how large an acquisition budget they stockpile, will ever reach 100% completion of any of the Sanborn high-number letter series RPPCs (besides a couple of odd "mini-sets" at Sanborn headquarters no one collects because no one knows about them, or could find any examples to start assembling into a set even if they did know about them, there are 20 different letter-series sets, ranging in size from 34 different postcards to, as already noted, 2500 different postcards).  My reason for this belief the previously mentioned potentially insurmountable barrier of Sanborn's repeatedly stingy small first print runs resulting in multiple "ultra-rare" postcards sprinkled across each set, which will likely never be found.  So what do you do as a collector - Give up?  Or continue to celebrate artificial benchmarks representing "less than completeness", a quest few people care about, and even fewer understand?