Night Owl Cards

(With the busy week ahead, I'm not sure how many posts I'll get in this week. Per usual I'll try my best. My goal every day is to post. Anyway, here's one now! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 359th in a series):    This card arrived in my collection yesterday. It's another box checked in the slow, slow quest for all of the Dodgers in the 1960 Leaf set.   This set doesn't get a lot of love. The photos are black and white. It's all portrait shots. It gets made fun of because Leaf packaged it with a marble instead of gum. But I have always liked it. I grew up on the late 1970s Renata Galasso/TCMA set that mimicked the 1960 Leaf design. I loved those TCMA cards. I thought the design was clean and satisfyingly old-school.   The first five Leaf Dodgers weren't tough to get, not even the Duke Snider. Black-and-white photos, you know.   The final three are another matter. Those who know this set are aware that the second half of the set (cards 73-14...

Exactly one year ago today, I began a series on the best card backs in collecting history. I told you that the series would be a nice little summer diversion. It might even last into autumn, but then we'd move on to more serious card matters. As usual, I was wrong. A countdown of the top 50 card backs is actually a fairly large undertaking, and like almost all of my "bright" ideas, the execution takes much, much, MUCH longer than anticipated. So we're now midway through 2011 and I'm just now ready to tell you what the No. 1 card back is. I'm sure the anticipation was at fever pitch maybe nine months ago. But now, you couldn't care less (or COULD care less, depending on your grammatical viewpoint). You're barely paying attention. But I'm pressing on, because that's what I do best. Here we go. The No. 1 card back in all of card history is ... ... ... ... 1992 Topps Kids!!!! Dayf was right! He did it again! He guessed it! ...

My recent vow to make every trade its own post has been a welcome challenge. It's forced me to find something unique about the cards, or at least one card, and write about it. I like that. It's good for me. Like peas and cauliflower and (*gag, wretch*) beets. But it's also causing issues. I'm in major backlog mode. Both physically and mentally. The mental part is that I've got a crapload of ideas from these cards and they're all lined up waiting for their stories to be told. But I have zero time. Zer-O. You don't know how often I wish I was independently wealthy. Not because of the money. But because of the TIME. I need to become a college student again. The physical part is there are cards from trades stacked up all over in the living room waiting, just waiting for somebody, anybody to, for the love of god,   DO SOMETHING . The line of card stacks is getting longer and longer and longer. I can I hear the stacks crabbing about the stac...

So, the Million Card Giveaway cards that I ordered arrived on Wednesday. I ordered the three that I said I would, paid the four bucks in shipping, and waited. I know most people are going to accumulate a bunch of cards before they order, but I wanted to see what the process was like. Honestly, I expected them to take forever to get here. They took two weeks. I can't argue with that. The cards arrived in a padded envelope. Each of the three cards was secured in a penny sleeve inside of a top loader. The three top loaders were sitting inside my folded shipping order. Unlike the Wax Wombat, I did not encounter any cards  trying to escape their top loader pouches . They were safely secure. As for my expectations of card condition, I had none. Well, I had slightly more than "none." I did expect something more than a card folded in half 25 times. But other than that, I figured they're buybacks. They're probably in relatively respectable condition, but not mint o...

I received my Dodger card out of the Topps Million Card Giveaway. No, it's not poor Leron Lee. Didn't you hear? I have three of them already. Besides, dayf pulled his offer. I think he got the sense that I wasn't too enthused about another Lee card. He mentioned something about GMs and a team that got spanked by Willie McGee in the 1982 NLCS and took someone else's offer. That's OK. Because I am enthused about this: In the name of all that is sweet, beautiful and tasty, that's a freakin' 1960 Rip Repulski card!!! And it came to me over the Million Card Giveway trade waves. You may not know Rip Repulski, but I do. That's the same man that is on this card: I babbled about that card here . And here's part of the terrific back to that piece of '56 fantasticness. Gritz76 of Project '62 offered me the 1960 Repulski card through the Million Card Giveaway. I thought he might offer me something, after I redeemed this card: I had po...

The fifth blog bat around asks us to brag a bit. "What is the best experience you have had acquiring cards or memorabilia?" OK, I'm gonna brag a bit. But first I'm going to address the question. The question implies that you actually DID something to acquire these cards or memorabilia. It assumes there is a story about "the process," a journey, an undertaking. Hopefully, it's an interesting story. Maybe it's funny or uplifting or fraught with danger and intrigue. But there is no "process" to my acquisition. I did absolutely, positively, 100 percent nothing to acquire a bunch of 1956 Topps cards. Sometimes, believe it or not, just raising your hand and saying, "I collect baseball cards!" is enough. So, here is my story. I mentioned it one other time on this post . But I want to go into a little more detail this time. My father worked for the city. He was in charge of the city's water supply. It was a job with a lot of respons...