Night Owl Cards

The other day I displayed this photo on a post to celebrate the fact that my 2011 Topps Lineage minis set was finally fully paged. But there is one thing very unusual about this photo when it comes to my collection: The cards are inserted one per pocket. With virtually all of my sets, I insert cards two to a pocket. I know this makes me odd. I had no idea exactly how odd until I started a blog. It seems that most binder folks store their sets one card to a pocket. Periodically, when the topic comes up as it did earlier today, and I inform people that I double-bag pages, I get a "you do WHAT?", and then after my response, I get a "well if you must." And I do "must". Putting two cards in each pocket began out of necessity. When I was a teenager and first became aware of pages and binders to display a collection, I didn't have any money. Back then, you could find pages only through mail-order catalogs. They weren't readily available and...

A few posts ago, I showed some pictures of "the card room" in my home. It's your typical assortment of card stacks, boxes and binders, binders everywhere. I mentioned in that post that I stack binders on top of each other because I read somewhere that storing binders vertically can warp pages and then warp your cards. But stacking comes with a cost, especially if you're trying to cut corners. I have a lot of card interests and consequently a lot of cards. But I don't have the money or the space for all those binders. So I do two things that I know will cause several collectors to shake their heads. First, I double-bag my pages -- 18 cards per page. I have done this since I first knew there were binders and pages to store cards. I've done this for so long that leaving nine cards to a page to this day seems extravagant. Almost wasteful. The only set that I have not done this for is the 1956 Topps set, because the card backs are so fantastic. If I w...

A couple of online conversations both on the blogs and Twitter recently have made me think a little bit about my persistent battle to avoid being known as a pack rat. I admit there's a little pack rat in me. I'm a collector, it's part of the job description. But I try to keep the accumulation mostly to pieces of cardboard -- the right size of cardboard -- and limit everything else. I also try to store items in a way that makes sense, both to me and to other people who live with me. I've addressed my sorting and storage habits in past posts. But I don't think I've done it all at one time, in a single post. So I'm going to do that here. I don't really expect it to help anyone. It's not a perfect system. As far as bloggers, some are more organized and some are less (I'm sure you know who is who, I don't need to name names). But it's ideal for me. SORTING My glorious roll top  card desk is the sorting station. When packages co...