Night Owl Cards

    If you visited my card room -- and I still plan to do some sort of blog tour of it someday -- you would note that one blogger has a notable physical presence in the room without actually being there. That's Rod of Padrographs . He has sent me so much quality stuff over the years. I don't just display anything in a spot where I can see it every day but Rod manages to find things that I don't mind seeing every day. Two of the posters on my card room walls -- the Ron Cey/penguins Nike poster and the owls poster -- are both from Rod. There's a Sandy Koufax children's book on display high on a shelf. That's from Rod, too. And, of course, the Ron Cey-signed birthday card greeting that Rod engineered is in full view as well. The cards in my card room are mostly stored neatly in binders or in boxes, not visible unless you open them. But if you did -- and I do -- you'd see Rod's contributions there, too. The number of cards from Rod in my collection grew rece...

    Anyone who wished that the end of 2020 meant the end of Topps/artists projects like Project 2020 clearly didn't notice the popularity of the project. The same goes for online-exclusive cards, "living sets" and pop culture-influenced cards. You may choose to ignore it -- and I do, all the time -- but all of the above is here to stay. There are enough collectors purchasing stuff, at least for now, for Topps to go back to the well over and over. Topps loves beating concepts to death and as long as people are signing up, Topps will ride it until even the idea itself is crying "ENOUGH!" Project 2020 is living on in something called "Project 70," which is using Topps' 70th anniversary this year as the name tie-in. For Project 70, Topps has added far more than the 20 artists working on the Project 2020 series and several artists have released an advertisement flyer alerting people of the project. The catalog of artists includes ones that were in on Pr...