Night Owl Cards

  I may whine about all of the promoted platforms for obtaining cards -- according to who you talk to, the best place for finding cards is ebay, sportlots, COMC, TCDB, cardbarrel, Facebook, Twitter, or something I don't remember because that's too many places -- but I recognize the importance of staying connected. If you want to trade like we did on the blogs in the old days, you either have to add a platform to your inventory -- something like Facebook or TCDB -- or stay connected to as many bloggers and former bloggers as possible.   The latter can be a lot of work, bloggers aren't as accessible as they once were. Everyone seems to be busy. Fortunately, I've been around for quite awhile with a high-profile blog so bloggers of all sorts -- current ones and former ones -- think of me when distributing cards.   Thanks guys!     You're looking at the first-ever die-cut card. Who knew that Post was offering die-cut parallels in 1962? This homemade jobbie arrived fr...

I've been back in the hobby for 15 years now, ever since I started attempting to complete my favorite childhood set, the 1975 Topps set, in 2004. That exercise jump-started my return and slowly led to me collecting modern cards again (2006), starting a blog (2008), writing magazine articles about cards (2018) and, well, here we are. Without a year-by-year examination, I think I have spent every year of those 15 years dealing with 1975 Topps in some way, shape or form. For the first couple of years, I was completing the actual set. For the next few years I was working on completing the '75 mini set. In between, there were the 2011 Lineage '75 minis, and then I discovered 1975 Topps buybacks, and now this year there are '75 tributes in 2019 Archives. So, yeah, it's always 1975 in these parts. I have never moved on from " Don't Call Us, We'll Call You ". I think everybody knows this, too. Because ever since I decided to try to land all of...

I was intrigued by garveyceyrusselllopes' post this morning on early 1960s Jello cards because like many collectors I've never been able to tell the difference between Jello cards and the Post cards that came out at the same time. Oh, sure, there are lots of places you can go where they'll tell you how to figure out the difference, but that means actually having to reeeeaadd something that isn't a card blog and I'm so laaaaaaaaazy. So even though I have the information right in the next room in the form of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, I just kept right on going, "maybe I have a Post card, maybe I have a Jello card, oh, well, I guess I'll never know, la di dah!" I'm glad someone finally put a stop to that. Jim's blog post referenced Wrigley Wax's blog post from a couple of months ago that had information on how to tell the difference. This basically concerns only the 1963 Post and Jello cards because with the 1962 Pos...

As a small-town consumer who frequents big-box establishments, there is no more welcome statement than this: "Register X is open. No waiting." Prepare for the inevitable stampede. As a former checkout clerk, I would say only, "Register X is open." I'd leave out the "no waiting" because I knew what it did to people. I didn't want to be responsible for trampled beings. But this is evidence that one of the major annoyances of childhood never ever goes away. We hate waiting. Two of the most frustrating obstacles for me as a kid were things that cost money (I had no money) and things that required waiting (I had no patience). So you can imagine what baseball cards on cereal boxes did to me. Frosted Flakes -- this box shows the very first Kellogg's 3-D cards I ever obtained from 1977 -- would promise you a single card inside, which would touch off a battle for ownership among my brothers. The rest of the cards you could get IF you cut ou...

I had decided that I would no longer feature my Listia acquisitions on the blog. It's not that I suddenly have a problem with the site. It's just that I wonder how many people are interested in seeing 1990s cards of Dodgers. "Look what I got" works if the card or the situation is something exceptional. And it's worth it, too, if it's a trade post. (Because no matter how many people turn callously away, I know that at least one person is interested). But picking up some '90s card online? From someone no blog reader knows? It's really not necessary anymore. Anyone who is intrigued by Listia is already on there. But then I looked at the cards that I got off the site recently and decided ... I GOT TO TELL SOMEBODY!!!! You lucky, lucky people. I will start with shiny and then gradually morph into moldy. It'll be like seeing cards devolve right before your very eyes. Consider it a science experiment. I'll even sign a note for your teacher...