How to start collecting Dutch gum cards

Dutch gum cards, filmisar in Sweden, were printed from 1950 into the early 1980s in more than a hundred series. Nobody collects all of it. New collectors who start with "everything" usually end up with a box of unrelated cards. Pick a corner instead. Here are three that work.

Collect one set

The easiest way in. A set has a fixed number of cards, one look, one year. You know what finished looks like.

1962 Serie N is a good first set: 246 cards, 87 in stock now, colour, film and music stars, cleanly numbered. Most numbers are cheap; a few are hard. Every series page shows the full checklist and which cards are in stock, so you can see how hard a set will be before you start.

Collect a name

Pick a star and chase them across every set they are on. There is no natural end, but you get range: the same face over a decade of printing.

Scale varies a lot. Elvis Presley is on 466 cards across 53 series (174 in stock now). Marilyn Monroe is on 41 cards across 26 series (8 in stock now), one or two per set. James Dean is on 62 cards across 16 series (29 in stock now). Audrey Hepburn is on 114 cards across 36 series (50 in stock now).

The stars pages gather every card of a name from all sets, with the ones in stock first.

Collect a theme

If neither a set nor a name grabs you, cut it another way: one year across all sets, only musicians, only Disney, only the sets printed in Holland. The series index filters by decade and stock.

Condition

These were cheap cards handled by children. Soft corners and edge wear are normal. Sharp examples cost more, most of all on cards from before 1958. On the 1950s colour sets the printing is often out of register; clean copies are scarcer. Buy mid grade for the bulk of a set and hold out for a sharp copy only on the cards that matter to you.

Buying

Sets are built one card at a time. Every series and star page here shows current prices and links straight to the listing, or browse everything in our eBay shop to get a feel for prices. Tick what you want and it lands on your want list, where you can buy what is in stock and send us the rest.