Statistics
Now there’s a catchy title for a Blog entry, guaranteed to turn away nearly everyone who sees it. Not to worry, if you’re this far, you’re over the worst of it.
First, thanks for ideas for future entries, as we asked for last time. We’ll get to those. For right now, and for no special reason, here are some statistics for you about our cards and categories:
* Total number of countries/political entities: 177
* Total number of themes: 101 (after deleting a few we didn’t like)
* Largest theme categories: Hotels (811); Aviation (626)
* Most cards in each geographical category:
Africa – Sudan (119)
Asia – Malaysia (923); PR China (845) – excluding Hong Kong
Europe – Germany (347); Finland (294)
North/Central America ex-USA – Canada (426)
Other locations – Australia (178)
South America – Brazil (438); Argentina (326)
USA – California (733); New York (285)
What’s the meaning of all this? Not much. For a long time, South America was our weakest link, and we still really want to find cards from Guyana and Suriname to round things out. If we were now going to target another area, it would be Africa, as we’re still missing nearly half the countries. As for Asia, Malaysia is a special case and we’ll write about that later. Clearly, big countries = more cards, but at the same time, our competitors have those well covered so we need to decide the best way to spend our time. Moving forward, “exotic” is the way to go.
Wherever you are, when you’re finished reading this, go send a postcard to a friend. They will remember and appreciate it.
Until next time …
Sudan?? Why Sudan. I would have expected that at the bottom of most people’s lists. Thanks for these posts. As a collector I do enjoy your musings.
~Goloh replies: OK then, this is a good time to explain Sudan. A good friend here in Hong Kong was moving away, and wanted to downsize a bit before packing. He was trying to match his belongings with people who would appreciate them, and with his stash of ancient Sudanese cards he found the right person. I was happy to buy them from him, as I knew he also needed some “moving money”, so all was well, and Sudan suddenly became our most prominent African country.
Sometime later we got an e-mail from a University in Khartoum asking permission to reproduce the images for a book they were writing. Of course we said yes, and asked for a mention in the footnotes, but don’t know what happened after that.