Night Owl Cards

An old high school classmate asked me this week how to go about selling some completed Topps baseball sets that she had purchased for her sons each year while they were growing up. I explained how to search for the sets on eBay by using the completed listings option, but because she is one of my favorite former classmates, to help lessen the shock for her, I searched the sets myself and then gave her an average for each of them, along with an explanation of why they weren't worth much more than what she had paid for them originally. The sets were from 1997-2008 and with the exception of the 2001 set, which at 790 cards is the largest of the bunch and also contains the Ichiro rookie card, it was clear that nobody values completed sets anymore. At least not non-vintage completed sets. I already knew this. But seeing it underlined in back-lit numbers stunned me a bit. The 2005 complete set sells for only 40 bucks? I like the 2005 set! I'm trying to complete the 2005 set...

Let's get this blog going again. I'm trying to complete 1980s Fleer sets from 1981-88, but I don't have want lists up for everything yet. I'm not all that into finishing 1986 and 1987 Fleer at the moment so that's why there are no want lists for those. And for whatever weird reason, I have ignored my wants for 1982 Fleer, maybe because it's 1982 Fleer and if it's going to be all blurry and off-center then it's just going to think about what it's done UNTIL I'M GOOD AND READY! Anyway ... With 1984 and 1988 Fleer completed, that leaves the odd years of Fleer remaining, all of which appear on my want lists. Recently, Scott of I Need New Hobbies tackled those lists, sending me wants from 1981, 1983 and 1985 Fleer. Here are the goods: Just two needs from 1981 Fleer but I had only nine cards left before these two arrived. This set's notorious tendency to yellow is on full display here. I'm sure I have other yellowed '81...

On the day after Christmas, I backed out of the driveway, turned to my right, and spotted a Christmas tree in a snowbank in front of a neighbor's house. This always depresses me. I hope that people who dispose of their tree the second it's not Christmas day have an allergy problem or the tree was a firetrap or something rational other than "I'm done with Christmas, bring on the dullest part of the year!!!" I'm one of those loonies who wants Christmas to last forever, or at least the 12 days that are sung about in the song. I want my ladies dancing and drummers drumming. Right now, for me, is the Christmas season. There are still Christmas cookies in the house, lights shining outside and those cloying Lifetime Christmas movies airing around the clock. Properly extending the Christmas season also gives me the perfect excuse to show some festive packages that were sent with the spirit of the season in mind that I mostly received before Christmas. For e...

I suffered yesterday one of the great misfortunes that can happen to a modern-day card collector. A web browser crash ate my want lists. All of them. They're all gone. I'm not sure how it happened. I was updating the want lists with some cards that arrived in the last couple of days. I closed the file and then returned to my list of posts. That's when I got the rotating "loading" circle and -- wap -- the browser crashed. When I opened the blog back up and went to my want lists page, it was empty. Years of work and 60 years of want lists gone. The Internet Wayback Machine wasn't much help. It could retrieve my want lists from April of last year, but that would mean trying to track down a year's worth of updating and that didn't sound attractive at all. Shockingly, what did sound attractive was starting up my want lists from scratch. So that's what I'm doing. 2017 wants are already up and I've started on 2016. I've also j...

On Thursday, I completed the 1972 Topps baseball set. This is tremendous news. It is tremendous news in particular for a 9-year-old kid from Upstate New York who had just wandered into a world of baseball and the picture cards that display that sport. He is awe-struck, astonished and, frankly, a blithering idiot. His mind has been blown. The '72 set -- I've said it before -- is the one set that I think of when someone says "baseball cards". To someone younger, the cards may look rooted in the past, wild and crazy, and almost primitive. But that's only because they did not stumble into this hobby during one golden, sun-splashed day in the early 1970s. I saw 1972 Topps cards only in the hands of older kids. And I probably first saw them before I even started collecting. To me, those cards -- that design -- said Baseball Cards. That's what trading cards were supposed to be. That has stayed with me for so long that now when I look at my binder of 1972 Top...