Night Owl Cards

(Happy National Pet Day. There was a point a couple years ago when I thought there'd never be another pet in the house. I even wrote about it. Today, there's a cat who is about to turn one all up in my business. Knocked over a bunch of cards today. She's officially part of my hobby. Time for Cardboard Appreciation, this is the 351st in a series):   I reached a collecting milestone yesterday when this 1941 Play Ball card of former Brooklyn Dodgers MVP first baseman Dolph Camilli arrived.   Although I have a modest number of pre-1950s baseball cards, this was the first time I ever purchased one. Everything else pre-1950 has arrived as a gift or in a trade.   I've written many times that I collect cards for which I feel a connection. Those are mostly cards related to my childhood, my adolescence, my first disposable income days and all the way to the present time. If I know the players -- especially if I have seen them play and read about them when they were playing -- the...

That's the first line of a note in the latest fantastic card package from Dave. "A little more of everything," is the best way to sum up the contents. I could easily break this up into six different posts, but what fun is that? No, you need to see this in its totality. Gaze upon the splendor. Marvel at the magnificence. Bathe in the bounty. We're going to cover a little more of everything. I'll start with this: That's a rack pack of 1987 Topps, carefully selected for the Fernando Valenzuela all-star glossy showing in the first panel. See, Dave takes me seriously when I say I want to try to complete 1987 Topps passively. I don't want to intentionally buy a 1987 Topps card. And I certainly don't want to put up a want list. I'd like to see how close I can come to doing this. I'm looking forward to opening this rack pack and seeing how many I need. Random Dodgers, most of which I'm sure fill holes (we'll see later). Yes...

Tell me, veteran card bloggers, do you ever think back to the days when you had no blog, when you collected in a vacuum, when no one heard your plaintive cries of "look Aaron Rowand is wearing a glove on his HEAD!" In those days, if someone told you all you had to do was write about cards in a public forum in order to find other collectors and build your collection, you would treat it like the joke that knew it was. In fact, if you received that information, this very day, you'd be certain that you were being pranked. Well, I don't do pranks. It's mean and a waste of time. So when I say I get cards because I write about cards on a blog, there is no joke, no catch, no under-the-table dealing, no kickbacks, no shady stuff, no auto dealership fine print, no snickering, no nothing. It's simple: write about cards publicly, get cards. Pretty cool, huh? I'll show you how cool. I received a bunch of cards from Dave a week or two ago. It's filled...