Night Owl Cards

  I received a mailer the other day and I can't decipher the sender. There's the familiar "ebay" shipping label in the front, but the cards inside, although tailored to my interests, aren't anything I ordered. The return address has a female name, but I don't recognize it, and with the amount of female collectors I've come across during the life of this blog, I would know if she was a past trader. The envelope came from Minneapolis, and again, the collectors I know from Minneapolis don't go by that address and none of them have a significant other with that woman's name, I don't think. I don't know. I don't know them that well.   So, with no note and nothing else to go on, I have to assume it's some bygone acquaintance.   This blog is in its 13th year and I've communicated with hundreds of collectors and received almost as many packages. The list of bloggers who are no longer blogging about cards is massive and impossible to fit...

(Welcome back to Cardboard Appreciation. This is going to have to be a short one because work won't let us have nice things like insightful blog posts about baseball cards. Nooooooooo, we've got to read about someone's pointless high school soccer team instead. Heh. This is the 186th in a series): This card has fascinated me for too long. Those who collected in the early 1980s know that there are three versions of this card. One in which Jackson is wearing a red cap with a "T" visible (like the card above). One in which Jackson is wearing a black cap. And one in which Jackson is wearing a red cap with no logo showing. They were known as "error cards" at the time. I was most intrigued by the black cap version. Since I had the red cap Jackson, I wondered how was it possible that he could be wearing a black cap? I knew at the time about airbrushing, but fledgling Fleer wasn't known to airbrush then and besides, who would airbrush a red cap blac...

(Happy Labor Day, all! Let's celebrate with the 47 th edition of Cardboard Appreciation! Enjoy the cards!): The idea of the black-bordered parallel is nothing new. I don't know exactly when it began, but the first time I recall coming across it was in 1992 with the Leaf set. It's an extremely simple idea, and I'm almost embarrassed by how much I still enjoy black-bordered parallels after all these years. In fact, if I had any money, I'd probably be pursuing all the black-bordered cards in this year's O-Pee- Chee set. This Andre Ethier OPC parallel was sent to me by Kevin of the great Orioles Card-O-the-Day site. Ethier is the only Dodger that I still need from the base OPC set. But there are a number of black-bordered Dodgers that I've yet to obtain. I think I enjoy the black so much because, unlike the gold parallels -- an idea that I find so old and tired that I think it should be taken outside and shot -- black-bordered parallels draw more a...