Night Owl Cards

(A chilly welcome to you all on "Old Stuff Day". Apparently this day was created to encourage people not to do "the same old stuff" and then modified to encourage people to clean out their "old stuff." But I will choose to recognize the day by showing my card Old Stuff. Like I do many days of the year on this blog! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 349th in a series):   I added these two Drake's cards from Diamond Jesters' Time Travel series . The Drake's cards from the 1980s have always interested me for a few reasons.   a) The 1981 Drake's set was the first time I owned a complete set. It was very easy to do, all I had to do was send away for it and the 33 cards were mine. I wrote about it a number of years ago .   b) That same '81 set is numbered by race. Yeah, really. Coincidence or not, it's there as plain as the cardboard it's printed on. I did a post about that, too, after being tipped off by a commenter and f...

A number of months ago, I received thousands of trading cards from my brother-in-law. He ripped off some kid at a rummage sale and I was the main beneficiary. I found a lot of goodies in those cards. But there were also plenty of cards straight off the boat from the era of overproduction. Among the cards I have growing old in my dupes box are countless 1991 Topps, 1991 Donruss and 1989 Topps. There are also plenty of 1988 Topps, which I might have more of than any other set that was ever created. I happened to be leafing through those same '88 Topps yesterday afternoon to find some cards for a trade (don't ask). The condition of these cards are all over the board. Some look like they came directly out of a pack and some look like they were used to grout tile. One of the less pleasant cards I came across was this Wally Joyner item. It's plagued by so many creases that Joyner actually looks like he's running from them. There's also an unsightly stain on the u...

I collected next to no cards in 1988. Hopelessly in love with both a girl and bar-hopping, cards were decidedly uncool in '88. No time and no desire. Rack packs of 1988 Score could have been hanging in an aisle in the drugstore I frequented almost every week. But I'll never know because I never paid attention. Chances are they were. As I've come to find out, there is an endless supply of 1988 Score. Still, I find it to be one of my favorite sets of the entire junk wax era, and I should finally be completing it very soon. I like it because it's colorful and the photos, for the most part, are interesting. It's got that cool Reggie Jackson subset, too. But I admire 1988 Score for the card BACKS. Color mug shot, team logo, yearly stats, vertical orientation. Sure, it has all that. But far and away the most admirable part of the entire set is the write-up on each card back. Look at that thing. That's like 250 words there. (the word "homers" is ...