Night Owl Cards

I feel like I have certain responsibilities with my hobby. One is to try to keep a relatively tidy "work" station. There are other people in the house. They don't need to see my scattered piles of team bags, toploaders, mailers, receipts, etc., never mind that all of it combined gives me endless joy. They can only see what's in front of them. But when cards stack up, even I get bent out of shape. I keep stacks of cards for the current year (2016 cards), as well as stacks of incoming and outgoing cards. Anything beyond that I try to store as soon as I am able. There are a bunch of cards that have been sitting out, unattended, for quite a while. They are all non-regulation-size cardboard, the vast majority Ginter mini size or postcard size. I ran out of pages for those cards a long time ago, and I enjoy buying boxes of pages as much as I enjoy buying socks. It's a necessity I put off til I can't puts it off no more. So I decided to do something about it...

I'm supposed to relay how I first decided to collect sports cards and when. So says  Fuji . Or maybe it's Nick . It's getting very confusing, and truthfully, I'm not playing much by the rules, so never mind. The "when" part of this question is easy. I first collected sports cards (re: baseball cards) in 1974 when I was eight years old. As I've written here many times, I say "collected," but actually I had no idea what "to collect" meant in '74. The 1974 Topps baseball cards I received that year came from my mother who had just returned from a grocery store trip. She handed my brother and I some cards from the store, one of those cello packs with about 30 or so cards, if I recall correctly. And, as I've also mentioned many times, we admired, cherished and marveled over those cards for those summer months. And then, when school came around, we chucked them in the garbage. Don't rock the boat, baby . We already had M...

If you don't know what 1972 song this post title refers to, then I know one thing about you already: your name is not Brandy. Because if it was, you would have had this song sung to you at least 5,000 times over the course of your life so far, probably a quarter of those times by some drunk in a bar. But if you're not Brandy (what a good wife you would be), and you're not familiar with the dulcet tones of 1970s pop rock, then you probably aren't all that familiar with the 1972 Topps set either. And that's a shame. It is one of the best -- certainly one of the quirkiest sets -- that Topps has ever produced. It is one of my favorites. It is the subject of one blog , which has grown distressingly quiet of late. And it is a new object of affection for one of our favorite bloggers . To that one blogger, some advice: save yourself. OK, not really. But collecting this set is fairly challenging. I'm barely a third of the way through completing it and it's a daunt...