Ancient Web: Jeff Allender's House of Checklists Counted Nonsport Cards

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Sports trading cards have price guides and databases everywhere. Jeff Allender built a different sort of reference shelf: checklists for the cards featuring comics, fantasy illustrations, science fiction, movies, television, monsters, novelty art, and just about anything else that wasn't a ball game.

Visit Jeff Allender's House of Checklists.

The homepage is an unapologetically large index. Collectors are directed into categories such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Garbage Pail Kids, fantasy art, comic characters, horror, and old tobacco and trade cards. There is no mysterious recommendation engine. You choose a category, a series, and a list of cards.

Allender explains that the site passed 1,000 checklists in April 2001, 2,000 in July 2002, and, by his count, 7,539 in June 2018. Those are the site's own milestones, but they establish that this archive grew through the early-2000s collecting Internet rather than appearing yesterday.

The checklist is the artifact

A surviving checklist for a 2016 set called The Mob gives the flavor. It identifies base cards, short prints, inserts, packaging variations, and numbered entries such as Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and historical episodes. It is organized so that somebody with a shoebox of cards could compare what they own with what was actually issued.

Other pages include promo cards, convention exclusives, autographs, and obscure variants. The changes page records corrections and newly added checklists. That matters because the difference between a complete card set and a nearly complete one may be an item distributed at a single event.

The homepage thanks a vast community it calls the Checklist League. Its long roll of contributor names shows an old-Web method of building a database: people email information to an individual maintainer, who assembles and credits it.

A June 2020 update lists new sets from The Mandalorian, Stranger Things, The Evil Dead, and other franchises. Those dates show how the archive continued to grow; they do not make its older material less historical.

The site makes a point of saying the lists are not offers to sell or buy. Its purpose is documentation. A collectible can be almost invisible to everyone except the person wondering whether card number 87 was ever printed.

Explore the House of Checklists and its dated change log.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.