Night Owl Cards

  Like I mentioned a couple of week ago, the 1975 Topps buyback game has reached a new level since 2024 Heritage came out. What has been mostly a down-low pursuit, in which I have been grabbing buybacks here and there for the last seven years sometimes at a rate of a handful per year, is now like chasing buybacks on speed. New '75 buybacks, buybacks that I need -- not the same damn Bobby Heise buyback over and over -- are up for sale all over ebay. And I've been on that stupid site at a rate the last few weeks that I haven't been on since before the blog had begun. I don't like being on ebay that much, especially when it comes to bidding. I already have a low impression of humanity without having to go through that. But for chasing down more buybacks from my favorite set of all-time? Sure, I'll wallow. Before Heritage came out, I owned 481 of the 660 cards in the set in buyback form. I knew that with what I saw available, I could get to 500 pretty quickly. So join...

I've noticed over the years that some bloggers only post when they have something new to relate, either a new card acquisition, or something card-related that happened to them at the hobby shop, or some event in their life. Even though that's probably the better way to keep one sane, that's now how this blog operates. This ain't Facebook. I try to blog almost every day because I think of cards every day. Daily blogging takes thought, creativity, persistence, and I wish there could be new card events every day but there just isn't. So I try to find card-related things to offer to fill in the gaps between "look what I did!' Along those lines, I am very close to debuting the 100 Greatest Cards of the '70s countdown. I have just a handful of '70s cards left to review and then I will rank them (the ranking actually doesn't take long) You'll probably see the first post within the next two weeks. OK, now on to a few card events that have h...

I think cards that replicate magazine covers is one of the best ideas that ever happened to cardboard. I'm not afraid to say that I was coming up with that idea when I was a youngster in the late 1970s. Blending my love for cards, drawing and reading, I would try to replicate magazine covers -- mostly Ranger Rick -- on index cards. But it took national card companies until the late 1990s, when Fleer and Sports Illustrated knocked heads, for that idea to appear as I dreamt it. Those late '90s cards that pay tribute to Sports Illustrated covers of the past are fantastic, and I just ordered a couple of the Dodger-centric ones that you'll see when they arrive. Believe me, it took all of my self-control not to order a bunch more. Since that time, there have been a few other "cover cards," most notably from the ESPN set of about a decade ago. A few days ago, I saw this Eric Gagne ESPN cover card during one of my online searches and I instantly had to have it....

I mentioned the other day that I had made my first card purchase on ebay in more than three years. That purchase begat another purchase, which begat another purchase. "Uh-oh," I thought. "This is how it started the last time." Don't worry. I've got things under control. A much more mature night owl is traveling the scenery these days. But while I'm here, I might as well show you what I got, right? Two of the items have to do with this card here: THE BEST DAMN ROOKIE CARD OF ALL-TIME!!! The last two cards were my first two ebay pick-ups in a long, long while. My question now is how many more versions of this card are there? I know the Walmart black and Target throwback cards are still out there. Those things are way too difficult to find, thanks to Topps' mercifully aborted stealth blaster plot of 2009-2011. I hope to track them down sometime. But besides those, what else could t...

In 1993, I was fully on board with the "cards are an investment" mentality that infiltrated the hobby in early 1990s. I bought one of these price guides every year in the early 1980s, and when I returned to collecting in the early '90s with a vengeance, I bought this particular price guide and consumed every page. In September of that year, I compiled a list. It was a list of my most expensive cards according to the prices listed in this book. I'm not sure why I made the list. I never acted on my "investment," meaning I never sold any of the cards. I guess it was basically a reminder of what I could get if I decided to be one of those movers in shakers in the hobby who bought and sold cards and got insanely rich. Or so I believed. I recently dug out the list I made in 1993. Here it is: The list is ranked in order of the most expensive cards according to the Beckett book. The list actually goes up to 50 and the other cards are listed on the back...