Night Owl Cards

    I don't think I need to tell you that I love lists. Half of my blog, probably, is some sort of list. I love making lists. I like compiling those lists into a series (a list of a list). I like organizing my cards according to lists.   I've been doing that since I was a relative tyke, sitting on the bedroom floor, laying out 10 cards (five on each row) in order of career batting order on the back, selecting the next card off the stack to my left, and then shifting the lined-up cards over one according to the new arrival's stats.   Lists are an easy way to make information digestible and entertaining. Creating lists enjoyed a big boost in popularity in the early 1980s, as there seemed to be new books every week about this list or that. Lists fell into overkill, especially since the advent of the internet and a whole bunch of fly-by-night websites that want clicks. But a well-maintained, thoughtful list is always interesting to me. I gravitate toward lists: Top sitco...

(*music fans, go to the end) The National is this coming next week and I know several collectors who are attending. Many of them attend every year or close to it.   I'll be in my usual spot, spending much less money and happy not to deal with crowds. Meanwhile, I have some cards here from someone who is planning to go to the big show in Chicago, or maybe is already on the way to digging in discount boxes.   Some of you have also recently received cards from Stuart at S.R. '75 Cards . So this is my turn to decipher what he sent, because a lot of it was from that black hole collecting period of the early 2000s. As an example, I had neatly separated the envelope into cards I needed and cards I didn't. Per usual, I turned the duplicate cards over to signal to my future self that I had them.   One card on its reverse side at the top of the stack caught my eye.     Card-creating gentlemen, this is why you always serial-number your cards in gold foil. I was looking at ...