Night Owl Cards

After basically taking the year off from collecting in 1990, I was back in 1991. I collected a lot of stuff in 1991 -- because there was a lot to collect. They blew the barn doors off in 1991. Cards and collecting and hobby people in general would never be the same because of '91. There was no going back. The genie was out of the bottle. Everyone had an accountant. We were all going to be stinkin' rich. And the quickest way to retirement -- in 1991 -- was to buy even more cards. The card companies were there for you. There were no less than nine major card sets in 1991, the most ever. I'm not even counting things like Classic and O-Pee-Chee Premiere. Nine sets to collect. NINE! For the first six years of my collecting existence I was collecting one solitary set and sticking my fist in a cereal box for another. That was it. NINE! The '91 card season is probably most notable for the growth in "premium" sets. Leaf in 1990 spawned Stadium Club and Ult...

I believe we just received two feet of snow in less than 24 hours. It's difficult to measure because lake effect snow doesn't sit still for a second, but it's been going nonstop since overnight last night. We're in a bit of a break now, but I expect it to start up again soon. All of this is nothing new around here, but it's still a pain cleaning off cars, shoveling driveways, driving when you can't see 20 feet in front of you, only to get to work so you can get an email lecture from the boss. Fortunately, I have yesterday to get me through today. Because yesterday was my lucky day . I emphasize "day" because, as you know, I'm a night owl. The best things usually happen for me at night. But on this particular day, I got up early (mostly to get ahead of the coming storm) to run a few errands. And one of those errands was using one of my Target Christmas gift cards. Weeee! I wanted to get something different with this gift card. But when I ...

There is a discount store on the other side of town that has been the topic of at least a dozen posts here, going way back to the first few months of the blog. The card offerings at the store, an Upstate New York chain called Real Deals, have never been as good as they were when I first posted about it. Back then you could find random offerings of early-to-mid 1980s Fleer mixed in with a stray 1990s Pacific card, and, of course, the usual junk wax. But the store is worth checking out periodically. Sometimes there are no cards at all. Sometimes someone has just opened a box of 1990 Fleer and a box of 1988 Score. You just never know. Nobody's getting anything they can display on a mantel here, but the potential for a fun rip is always there. The last time I was interested in the cards offered there is when my wife brought home a few packs of 1988 and 1989 Donruss. I'm the last collector on earth that enjoys opening a pack of that stuff, and as long as it was sitting on a...

I don't have much to say after yesterday's Archives diatribe, so let's play a game of "Better Going Than Coming". This is a game I play sometimes with my Upper Deck cards. Only Upper Deck cards will do, and the earlier the Upper Deck brand, the better. As you know, Upper Deck burst upon the scene with several innovations, but the most notable one for me was the fact that there was a large color photo on both the front and the back of the card. Wow. Periodically, I'd look at the photo used on the back of the card -- which was smaller, because UD had to squeeze in those infernal stats onto the back, too -- and wonder why the back photo wasn't the one on the front of the card. The card looked better going than coming! (By the way, the back of the Trammell card isn't much better than the front, and '89 Upper Deck had photos that are as dark as anything Donruss put out -- I never could figure out why nobody ever mentioned that). So let'...