Night Owl Cards

  My trip out of town for a few days was canceled. No, it wasn't COVID-related, but we're back at the nest without a lot to do.   The wife and daughter decided they wanted to check out the flea market close to the downtown area. I've mentioned this place before. Back when it was fairly new I went there a time or two and found baseball cards .   But I hadn't been to the place since before the pandemic, I think the last time was in the spring of 2019. The card selection had dwindled to next-to-nothing and with the hysteria over cards in the last couple of years, I didn't bother making another trip, surely there would be nothing left.   We walked into the place and it was clear it had expanded over those couple years I hadn't been there. Lots more stations to squeeze in people's junk, and they had added an upstairs portion. I don't have a lot of use for most flea market items, but I do gravitate toward periodicals and old record albums and there were lots o...

  I spent the weekend visiting my daughter and doing family things. That usually means time away from the blog and cards in general, but fortunately my daughter wanted to check out the antique mall and that means checking out the card bowl! If you don't remember, or haven't been following along, that is a ceramic bowl (or maybe it's wooden -- I don't know, I was distracted by cards) I found in a shop . That bowl contained individual vintage cards priced right. I visited the shop again yesterday, and while the wife and daughter entered and turned right, I immediately turned left and headed to the right corner, There, I found the familiar display case of mostly Yankees cards that I either wasn't interested in or were out of my price range. I quickly looked toward the table in the center where the bowl was. But there was no bowl. Oh man. Then I spotted a few nine-pocket pages of football cards over on a side shelf by a window. The first page contained 1977 Topps footb...

I've been sifting through some great cards sent to me lately and actually holding off on showing some of them. It's not that I'm hesitant to thank my benefactors, certainly not! But I try to coordinate my blog posts around here, sometimes obsessively so. But sometimes you just have to let go and show off! So I'm showing off. Recently -- well, not so recently now -- a terrific collector, Jonathan, sent me another batch of cool cards. Like usual, some of the cards were directly off my want list, others weren't on a want list at all but in line with what I collect, and others were simply surprises that, honestly, I didn't know existed. Jonathan is a set collector, like me, and he asked if I would advertise a handful of his set wants in hopes that someone out there would have the one card that he needed to complete some of them. I've agreed, because -- wow, the cards he sends. I even scouted out the images of the cards he needs. Here they are: ...

The cash from my most recent Beckett Vintage magazine article came in and I went right to work. I usually devote about a third of my magazine payments to card quests and I had a few lined up as soon as I knew I would be writing that article. One card that I had my eye on was this 1966 Topps Ron Perranoski. As you know, I don't care about graded cards, but this was the best deal I could find for this specific card in decent shape, and it accomplishes quite the job. It is a pesky high number and now that I own it, I have completed the 1966 Topps Dodgers team set. This is an achievement in a few different ways. Looking at the big picture, I have now completed the Topps flagship Dodgers team sets from 1964 through the current year. There is also precious little that I need to finish off all the Topps Dodgers teams sets of the '60s, although it will take me forever to do so. The easiest will be the two high number cards from the 1960 set that I still need. And then I...