A certain type of obsession only exists in very small groups of people. It never makes the news on a national level, but it’s surprisingly common among those who care. One of those places is the world of trading cards with academic theory on them. Right now, everyone in that niche world is talking about a single Gauntlett card that doesn’t have a number on it.
Like most good stories, it starts with something small. David Gauntlett, a media theorist, made a set of twelve digital Theory Trading Cards for his website theory.org.uk around the year 2000. Each one was simple, bright, and a little silly. It summed up a major cultural or media thinker in a way that looked like a sports card. The idea was meant to teach, not make money. The teachers could print them out. The students could hold an idea in their hands.
AltaMira Press added to the series with twenty-one two-sided cards featuring well-known figures in cultural and media theory a few years later. It was made correctly and sent to the right people. It was put together. That was it. It stopped quietly.
From the first twelve digital cards to the published twenty-one physical cards, something was missing. This is something that collectors have since noticed, or at least some of them say they have noticed. The numbering doesn’t map well. There seem to be gaps. And in the culture of collectors, a gap is like an open invitation.
It is tough to say when the whispering began. Most of the time, these things start in forums, comment threads, and other message board conversations that don’t seem important until all of a sudden they do. A scan is posted. Someone else says they have a copy that doesn’t match the sheets that are known. Someone else asks a question that no one can fully answer. It works like that most of the time.
The card in question was never part of a serialized run. It was linked to Gauntlett’s identity theory, or his “pick and mix” framework for how people build their identities through media. There was no print number in the corner. Not a single edition. Strangely enough, the fact that it’s not there is what makes it feel rare. Because you know the limit when you use numbered cards. If the card doesn’t have a number on it, you really don’t. It’s possible that so few were ever made. There may be more than that, too. The fact that no one seems to know for sure is both the problem and, depending on who you ask, the appeal.
Gauntlett has been refreshingly honest about where this material came from. On his personal website, he admitted that most of the old theory.org.uk content was no longer relevant and that he may have kept it online longer than was necessary. When people came looking for it, he just gave them the PDFs. From 2000 to present, the trading cards were used to teach. That was the honest way to frame it.
Collectors don’t always deal in honest frames, though. They trade in things that are hard to find, in bad shape, or that feel like they shouldn’t exist at all. There is a part of the brain that thinks this might be the only one, even though logic says it’s not, when that person sees an unnumbered academic card from a website that no longer exists.
It’s not really important whether or not the card is objectively valuable. It probably isn’t, at least not in a big financial way. It’s interesting how numbering, or the lack of it, changes how people think about how rare something is. There is no doubt about what a card that says “14/21” means. A card that doesn’t say anything also tells you something, but in a different way. The space is taken up by the imagination.
That has a lesson in it that Gauntlett might like. His theory about identity says that people make sense of the world through media and build a sense of who they are from the cultural materials they have access to. It turns out that collectors do the same thing—they give things meaning by figuring out how rare they are, how good they are, and what stories they’re willing to believe. The theory, in a strange way, describes the people who love it the most.
