That’s the number of different issues collector, and National OA Committee member, Bill Loeble reported to me at the 2007 NCLS. This is issues, not twill varieties or plastic back/cloth back differences.

In the early days of CSP collecting, pre-1980, we paid attention to “twill left rough” (TLR) or “twill right smooth” (TRS) because there were so few different issues. We have pretty much gotten away from this making Bill’s accomplishment even that much more impressive. Generally it is good that we have gotten away from technical varieties that were merely the result of production runs.

We do run the risk though of losing our history of first issue CSPs where twill direction or backing makes a difference between truly the first issue and later runs. Several that come to mind include Longhorn T1 cloth back – the true first issue – much harder than the later runs of this patch or Scenic Trails TLR or…. the list is long. Further, most, but not all, first issue CSPs were on TLR cloth. There isn’t really a good book on these that I’m aware of. The Ellis/Jones/Austin book is the best but even they don’t have all of this documentation. You have to go back to the early issue catalogs from the guys who ran the Illinois Traders’ Association (ITA) who were documenting this as it happened. Most of the web-sites are incomplete as well with respect to this information.

I am working on my CSP entry for my shopping cart. As of 1998 there were 5,450 issues in the catalog. Thus, we’ve basically doubled that number in 8 1/2 years. That works out to 650 issues per year. With 320 councils on average during those years that means 2 issues per council per year. No wonder there are so few national all issue collectors (but there are some!)

I collect all of the Michigan issues where I do admit to collecting varieties of twills, border, backing, etc. I have fun with it. Just going after Michigan gives me challenge keeping up with what’s been issued and special issues.

I had a lot of fun putting together a first issue collection (and why I did research on true first issues.) This area continues to bring collectors in as many of them can easily be obtained but then there are some real bears to track down let alone acquire.