Collecting Telephone Cards
With the rise in popularity of cellphones, gone are the days
of using telephone cards as a means to make telephone calls. However these
highly collectible pieces of plastic are still collected by fusilatelists
(telephone card collectors). I have also heard used the term Telegery for the
hobby.
Telephone Cards are collected for a variety of reasons,
primarily dictated by the picture or theme of a phonecard. No surprise,
Disney is the #1 phonecard collectible. Surprisingly, Coca-Cola is second and
McDonald's is third. Also popular collectibles are animals and artwork, birds
and flowers and ships and cars and space and sports players and movie stars and
comic images as phone cards are often collected by topic or theme.
Phone cards are special credit card-sized pieces of plastic
with preloaded credit for making a telephone call from a public payphone. But when you look at the extensive catalogue
of issues, the designs, the themes, the occasions they celebrated or
commemorated, it is easy to see how phone cards have become desirable collectibles.
Today it is a hobby that is followed by people the world over.
The first phone cards as we know them today appeared in
Italy in 1976, in the UK in 1981, and in the USA by the end of 1991. It is
estimated that there are roughly 2 million to 4 million people who collect
phone cards worldwide, many just casually.
Phone cards produced and sold in a country tended to match
the pay telephone system in that country. For example telephone cards from
Japan are magnetic, but in Great Britain they are optical, and in the United
States it was remote memory (which required a PIN number). Magnetic cards were
the most widely used because of the now-familiar magnetic strip on the card.
Twenty years ago, it was the fastest-growing hobby in Great
Britain, and increasingly frustrating for U.S. collectors who struggled to
obtain these foreign-made treasures (usually made in the United Kingdom,
France, Japan, China, and other countries) at a reasonable price. This, of
course, was the era before eBay.
The first phone card for use in the United States was a
NYNEX card, which sold for $5.25 in 1991 and, less than three years later, it
was considered a valuable rarity that was almost impossible to find.
Almost every country in the world has in the past or still
continues to issue telephone cards. Like stamp collecting, with so many
different issues, some in large number, some in very small numbers, collectors
of all ages have been bitten by the bug to start collecting them.
Designs vary from Christmas themes to TV and film themes to
wildlife themes. While other designs simply help to advertise and promote a
brand or business.
Early phone card designs originally occupied two thirds of
the face of the card, while advances in card printing and card technology, allowed
for designs that could be printed in full
on both sides of later issues.
As with most collecting hobbies, there are commonly seen
items and you also have the rarely seen and more desirable. Of course, the interest
of iHobb.com as a purveyor to collectors is the need to provide archival
protection to collections so they hold their value over time
Disney fans love to
collect everything Disney, from variations of Mickey Ears to the very popular
hobby of pin collecting that shows no signs of abating, even though there were
predictions more than a decade ago that the market was glutted and demand would
die soon.
One of the oddest Disney collectibles is Disney phone cards.
They are still being produced, but the demand for them is no longer as strong
as it once was.
As is true with all collectibles, the value of telecards is
determined by age, quantity issued, the
popularity of the theme or issuer, and the condition of the card. Unused mint
cards are more valuable because some cards like the Italian Urmet cards
required a corner be broken off before use.
Over the years telecard collecting has lost some popularity,
but they are still listings on eBay and plenty of collectors. And the need to
maintain condition of collections as the more rare cards will hold value into
the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment