Night Owl Cards

  I pulled the latest magazine issue of Beckett Vintage Collector out of the mailbox on Monday and paged through it without any urgency. I didn't have an article due to run, the last of them was in the previous issue.   So I was surprised about three articles in to see my name on a story about the 1954 Topps set. By golly, I did write that! More than a year ago!   I had figured that this one wasn't going to run. That happens sometimes, it happened to one of my articles once before. And being a writer and editor for a newspaper, I understand how that goes. Sometimes the article doesn't fit, there are too many other articles that are more timely or have better art or whatever. Or, heck, maybe the idea just isn't solid. I'll acknowledge that with this one, it wasn't one of my better ones.   But I was happy to see it in print. I've now appeared in the last three Beckett Vintage Collector issues, which had never happened before (there won't be a fourth straig...

  The latest edition of Beckett Vintage magazine showed up on the porch Monday. It contains my most recent article. The first 50-or-so pages of the issue is about the recently departed Willie Mays. I like the photo spread of every one of his Topps cards. My story shows up on page 72. It's about collector Roy Carlson, who has created a hobby buzz in the last year with his discoveries of picture reuse in Topps' vintage sets. I mentioned that I was doing a story on him in April and it has finally appeared in the August-September issue.    I'm the last person that should be surprised by how slow the wheels operate in the world of print publication, but the ones for magazine publishing are the very slowest. I did the interview in April and wrote the story in May and it shows up three months later. I almost felt like I had to talk to Roy again to update everything!   But I think it's an interesting article anyway. I always feel like I'm doing my job more when I interview...

  Not even three weeks after receiving the Oct/Nov edition of Beckett Vintage Collector with my story on the 1973 Topps set, the Dec/Jan edition arrived with another one of my stories. This was due to whatever delay postponed the arrival of the Oct/Nov issue with Rickey Henderson on the cover (which is now available at a grocery store in town here). But it was still head-spinning to get one magazine issue with my story almost immediately after the other one. The latest edition, with Brooks Robinson on the cover, should be on magazine racks by the end of the month. Mention of my article is at the top of the cover, where it says "That's a Unique Card." That's the start of the article. It's the second story in the edition, after the Brooksie cover story. My mission for this story was to write about "unique" cards within a set, meaning they were issued as part of a set, with a card number on the back, but were unlike any other card in that set. My inspiratio...

  So, the October/November issue of Beckett Vintage Collector appeared in my mailbox on Saturday, right before I headed out the door for a few days. As mentioned earlier, the issue's arrival was delayed almost a month. I'm assuming it was mail or distribution problems, but no matter, it's here now. I wanted to see if one or both of the articles I had most recently written were in this issue, with the terrific Rickey Henderson cover. One of them was. And I was informed that the other one will show up in the December/January issue. This is the 17th article I've written for Beckett. I'm mostly impressed that I can still come up with topics. Who knows how long that will last. This most recent topic is one I've written about on the blog many times, and others have covered this set quite a bit, too. It's been 50 years since Topps released the 1973 Topps baseball set, much-discussed in blog circles (I mentioned that in the article). So when I got the green light to...

    The June-July issue of Beckett Vintage Collector arrived at my doorstep Saturday and inside is my 16th article for Beckett, mostly with the Vintage magazine. That's still pretty cool, and there's newness for me with this issue as well. I'm actually interviewed for another article in the edition. The article in which I'm interviewed, by Kevin Glew, is on 1983 Topps, a set I absolutely love. It's the first long article in the magazine (if you know the Vintage mag set-up, there are a bunch of short news items or photographs to kick off things before the long-form stories). The article that I wrote is on the history of All-Star cards in Topps. It's the last article in the magazine. I never know how to react to my story's placement in the magazine. Should being last be considered the "last to make the cut" or should it be considered the "grand finale," like Sports Illustrated did back in the day? Whatever. I'm published in a slick, glo...