I first saw an entire AltaMira Press set in person in the office of a graduate teaching assistant in upstate New York sometime in 2019. The TA handled them like a 1999 Pokémon holographic, and they were in a Ziploc bag, of all things. Twenty-one two-sided cards with slightly yellowed corners. He had paid forty-two dollars for the used set, and he was already boasting about it in private. A sealed set selling for almost three hundred dollars was mentioned by someone on a media-studies listserv last week.
For what David Gauntlett himself has called a side project from 2006 that was initially printed as PDFs for UK undergraduates and was essentially intended as a teaching joke, that is an odd arc. When the AltaMira Press edition was released in 2008, it seemed like a mildly clever novelty for the conference book-table circuit. It expanded the set and gave each card a second side. They were not being handled like artifacts. They served as instructional materials. On them, you wrote. You misplaced them in a tote bag’s bottom.
Now that AltaMira’s edition is officially out of print, something else is taking place. The cards are now over. As I watch this happen, I can’t help but think of what Boris Jardine and his coauthors discussed in that BJHS Themes article about how collections come to an end: that amusing moment when an object’s value changes from “working” to “unique.” A tool becomes valuable instead of useful. Of all things, the Gauntlett cards are doing just that.
Beneath all of this is a specific kind of pain. Over the past ten years, American higher education has flattened itself onto open educational resources, such as recycled curricula shared across hundreds of campuses, BC Open Textbooks, and Lumen Learning modules. The trading-card assignment that most freshmen now complete, which consists of five interesting facts about a theorist (usually McLuhan, sometimes Goffman), is a downstream cousin of Gauntlett’s original concept, but it has been simplified, standardized, and stripped of its wink. Pupils recall their birth years. They overlook the theory. Despite this, professors continue to assign it because, according to a colleague, “it photographs well for the program brochure.”
Thus, the irony is acute. While their diluted classroom descendant is produced by the thousands every fall, the original cards—the ones with real intellectual jokes incorporated into their layout and the ones that took a stance on Foucault rather than merely listing his publications—are now hoarded in faculty offices. As the practice declines, the artifact gains value. Speaking with those who teach this material gives the impression that purchasing a sealed AltaMira box is a tiny, personal protest. To put it another way, this used to mean something.
I might be reading it too much. Perhaps academic collectors are no different from adults who still spend their weekends chasing first-edition Magic cards because scarcity is simply scarcity. eBay listings surge as print runs run out. What nostalgia does is what it does. A media studies PhD who first met Stuart Hall through one of these cards in 2010 is probably not exempt from the Drexel dissertation on adult toy collectors, which essentially contends that adult professionals construct entire identities around items from their formative years.
Even so. Something is being said aloud when a discipline’s most sought-after teaching tool is one that the discipline is unable to replicate. Assignments that scale have become increasingly common in American education. Fifteen years later, it has become less adept at creating the kind of tiny, unique, slightly too clever materials that people would genuinely want to keep.
