Night Owl Cards

I've written many times that I discard most of my rules for condition for a card from the 1950s or earlier. If I have a shot at getting a card from at least 70 years ago, I will not care if the corners are rounded, that there are a few creases, that it shows wear as a card like that should . (But I'll usually veer away from old cards that are stained or drawn on).   But those relaxed rules don't apply to most of the cards in my collection. Anything from the 1970s forward better be in tip-top shape. If it isn't, I'm probably going to upgrade it at some point.   But what about those cards between, say the mid-1950s through 1969? Where am I drawing the line?   I never thought about that until I acquired card #1 in the 1963 Topps set. It showed up yesterday.   This card has long been a Dodger need for the 1963 Topps set. It's fallen under the radar -- for years -- because 1) There are five rookie cards from this set with Dodgers on them that I still need and a coupl...

  (The giveaway results for the 2008 Heritage black back cards are at the end of this post). I mentioned yesterday that I added the 1970 Topps Tommy Davis card to my collection at the card show on the day that he passed. It sometimes takes the death of a ballplayer for me to realize how many connections I've made to that player through my collection. Although Tommy Davis' best days as a player were with the Dodgers, that was before my time, and I'm pretty sure I never saw him play a single game even though he lasted well into the 1970s.   But those connections are still there, it was never more apparent yesterday.   For example, I walked into my card room last night and looked to the far wall where some binders are stacked on the floor. On top of those binders are some Jay Publishing Dodgers photos that I received a couple of years ago. I've been recently getting those photos into a binder. But the ones that have been mounted I still need to decide what to do.   At t...

  I mentioned the other day that I bought a couple of cards with the cash that I received from my latest Beckett Vintage article. You saw the Campanella MVP card a few posts ago .   The other one was the 1960 Topps Tommy Davis card, and with that card, I have completed the 1960s Topps run of Dodgers cards.   No, I don't have the Ken McMullen rookie, or the Doug Camilli rookie. But those floating heads cards carry unreasonable prices because of the heads floating around with them (Rose, Uecker) and chances are good I will never own them. Even if I had the cash, it seems silly to buy a card for that price that looks like that.   So, except for those, I own all the Topps flagship Dodgers from the '60s.   It wasn't easy and it's taken decades. There were obstacles I never expected, like the price of the Bart Shirley-Grant Jackson card. I also had to overcome quite a bit of indifference early on, as I was just a wee-one during the back half of the '60s and most of th...

(Damn, it's busy around here. I guess I spoke to soon when I said it was the start of the easy season. Maybe in another week I'll be able to roust up some solid posts here. But for now, it's Cardboard Appreciation time. This is the 258th in a series): I'm a card collector, so I like to categorize things. And if I were to categorize the 1993 Upper Deck All-Time Heroes set, I would label it as "the classiest most difficult to store retro set of all-time." How's that for a category? The '93 All-Time Heroes set is a tribute to the famed 1912 T202 Hassan Triple Folders, one of the first sets to feature multiple big leaguers on one card. The 1993 UD set is 165 cards and features many players from the past, during a time when retro was just becoming popular with major card companies. It's also one of the few sets to trumpet a cause on the front of each card, promoting the Baseball Assistance Team, formed in 1986. Each card is 5 1/4 inches long,...

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the early 1960s Post and Jello cards and their similarities and how I still don't have a single Jello card in my possession. While Post cards ran between 1961-63 and I believe were available pretty much everywhere, Jello cards appeared only from 1962-63 and their availability was restricted mostly to the Midwest. So, it took someone from the Midwest to finally get me my first Jello card. Tom from Waiting 'Til Next Year recently announced that he had discovered a bunch of 1961 and 1962 Post cards at his card shop and dug out several in hopes of helping people complete their Post sets. You see, Tom lives in Illinois, which I am now convinced is the center of the card collecting universe. There seems to be a card shop or card show or flea market on every block. As a trade off, nobody cares whether there's a place for you to go to the bathroom at the Cubs game, but that's a trade I'd make in a second. Just let me work on...

I am not a crusader. When I was a kid, I'd watch as my father would get into "discussions" with sales people about this item or that and often -- not all the time, mind you -- get what he wanted. The older I got, the more aggravated I became with this technique, and although I've been known to stand up for what I believe in, most of the time I just let it go, because honestly ... I'm lazy. Or dislike talking to people. One of the two. Probably both. It took a page, a ridiculous nine-pocket plastic page that protects bits of cardboard, for me to get noisy. I have been campaigning for a page to house 1975 Topps style minis -- cards that are 3 1/8-by-2 1/4 inches -- since I found out that the old pages for that size of a card didn't exist anymore. For probably 3 or 4 years on this blog I've mentioned that there needs to be a page that fits these cards. Once I got on Twitter and connected with UltraPro, that's when I saw progress. As Topps began...