Night Owl Cards

  Yes, the same card topping consecutive posts. Sorry about that, but I wanted to discuss this card for just a minute. This will be a short post. Bloggers, do you pull a card from your collection for a post and realize for the first time -- even though you've owned that card for decades -- that it's got issues???? That's what happened to me with the 1979 Topps Willie Stargell when I pulled it for my previous post. It had never been apparent to me in all the times I've owned it, that it contains two significant creases at the bottom of the card, one in the bottom left corner and one in the right. I didn't even realize it when I took a photo of it for the post, nor when I uploaded it. But if you stare at it closely now, you can see them. There, I circled them (badly) for you. I didn't notice them until I was returning the card to its page in the 1979 Topps album. I put my fingers on the bottom corner edge and felt it give. Crap! I have no idea when this card first...

  Well, that upgrade post from a couple of weeks ago gained some traction! Thanks to that post and the generosity of reader Paul, I've been able to make some progress on an upgrade project that's been in the back of my head ever since I returned to collecting. I've mentioned before that my collecting return was sparked by a couple of instances: 1) Finding Topps' All-Time Fan Favorites cards from 2004 in the toy department of a K-Mart in Buffalo; and 2) Building the 1975 Topps set from a pawn shop downtown. I'd go to the pawn shop (it's long gone, by the way) on my lunch break or in the afternoon on a day off and leaf through the one dealer's card offerings. He had almost the entire set of '75s in boxes on one glass display counter, and behind me was another couple of boxes of vintage cards, mostly stuff from the '60s or early '70s, on another counter. And in the glass display were all kinds of cards I couldn't afford then (but probably coul...

  I always feel a bit sheepish writing about upgrading cards in my collection. Most of my card upgrading happens "underground," meaning I usually don't write about it. It feels very much like a first-world problem. But I shouldn't feel that way. First of all, just about any card collecting "issue" is a first-world problem because the hobby is a first-world hobby. Anything that I write on here that I consider "a problem" is not really a problem. Secondly, I'm not encasing my cards in plastic and assigning them a random number based on condition. Since there are plenty of people doing that -- and I still have almost no idea why -- I shouldn't feel weird about upgrading. All I'm doing is finding a different copy that doesn't have wrinkles or worn corners.  A portion of my recent sportlots order was upgrades -- a few of them quite overdue. I'm going to show off each of them and explain why they were upgraded.     1978 Topps Reggie J...

(I apparently made the faux pas of reminding an ebay buyer that payment was due soon. I don't sell all that much but isn't it reasonable to expect someone to pay within a few days? Anyway, payment's been made. So there. But the bitter taste in my mouth for selling grows stronger. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 319th in a series): My attempt to upgrade cards in my collection is always a challenge. For the most part, I've successfully upgraded cards from my childhood. Those would be cards from the 1975-79 Topps sets. The '75 set is close to completely upgraded, but that's the one set where I'm always looking for nicer copies. The '76 and '77 sets are close to done. The '78 set has a handful of notable cards with rounded corners that I've been too cheap to improve. The '79 set, I think, is as good as it's going to get. That means I'm on the second round of upgrades, which focuses on the cards I was buying to complete ch...

  My quest to upgrade my 1978 Topps set has been very successful. I figured people would be hesitant to send cards that were essentially dupes, but apparently lots of people have perfect 1978s just sitting around! I recently received another stash of upgrades from The Collective Mind . Here they are: Really good stuff. Thanks to these, I'm down to just 10 cards that I need to upgrade! That total was like 100 just a few months ago! Granted, the 10 are all cards nobody wants to give up -- a couple of Reggies, the Dawson rookie cup, Palmer, Carew, the Murphy-Parrish rookie catchers card. I'll have to get off my butt. But I'm thrilled by the progress. The only problem is I have blogged about 1978 Topps so often lately -- actually so often through the life of this blog -- that I'm lost as far as anything new to say. I thought of playing the game on the back for the few new cards I have, but the best any of them had to offer were a bunch of base-on-balls: That wouldn't ev...

  As much as I proudly wear my "kid in an adult body" badge everywhere I go, I cannot avoid that I am an adult -- one of advancing age. I follow a kid's game, I pursue a kid's hobby. I've been known to watch cartoons, play video games and insist on dessert. But it's a losing battle. I'm not a kid.   One of the best hobby examples I have is my compulsion to upgrade the sets I collected as a kid.   One of the first things I did when I re-entered the hobby in 2004 was pursue the first set I ever collected, the 1975 Topps set. I went about completing it. And because I was an adult, I upgraded the condition of the cards, too.   The kid part of me, who didn't think about card condition at all -- average wear and tear anyway, I never wrote on my cards -- was gone. I guess the ensuing years of shopping for clothes, cars, appliances, a fricking house, taught me that condition mattered. There was no going back.   So, my '75 set was completed and upgraded. I ...

I write a lot about the cards I collected as a kid. It's the period of collecting that means the most to me. I want as many of those cards as I can get. But I don't like everything that happened with cards and my collecting habits when I was a tiny cardboard addict. I have spent a lot of time and money on updating the cards I collected because I am much pickier about card condition than I was then. The very first cards I bought from packs are suitable for framing, sure. But for collecting? I can't have it. So I updated my entire 1975 Topps set from the ones I accumulated as a 9-year-old. It only made sense, I had to get all the cards that I didn't find as a kid, and adult me certainly wouldn't go looking for versions that were scuffed, bent and lacked corners, and the OCD wouldn't let me mix mintier cards with moldier cards. I did the same with 1976. And 1977. That's where I stopped. Because with upgrading it always feels like you're spending...