Off and running - 100th Anniverary Patches Ramping Up

Posted on February 8th, 2010 in CSP, Camps, Hobby News, Hobby Trends, Insignia, JSP, Jamborees, OA, Rank by ramore

Last week I was at my Scout office for a meeting and stopped by the trading post. They have the new boy rank patches out commerating the 100th anniversary year of the BSA. I think these are neat but the quality control is poor. There are at least three major varieties in this group alone. Some appear to have been made by the BSA. Others have ‘Made in China’ stickers on the back. The latter is a separate sore point but we’ll leave that for another blog. Anyway, variety collectors are going to have a field day figuring these out. I’m told there’s an Eagle patch as well but I’ve not seen it. I’ve also been told that Scout shops are to have returned their inventory of the regular items so as to be replaced with these 2010 pieces.

Then Destry and I went to the Indy TOR this past weekend. Their hospitality was great as always (except for the 9″ of snow.) Several councils now have out 2010 patches. That got me asking around how many items do you think we’ll have for the 100th anniversary? By “items” I mean regular issue pieces - CSPs, JSPs, OA items. I’m figuring it will be up to 5,000. Could be more. And this is not counting camp and camporee items or Jamboree staff items. One could spend a lifetime just to collect this year. Also, I was hearing quotes for “rare, limited edition” varieties at huge prices. Councils and lodges could kill a good thing. If you know of some egregious abuses, please pass on the comment. Thanks.

11,500 CSPs and counting

Posted on August 14th, 2007 in CSP by Roy

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.

[sales] [forum] [reference] [about us] [contact] [home]

Copyright © 1999 - 2009