Baseball cards from an antique mall

In my quest to explore my new(ish) surroundings, I recently went to an antique mall about thirty minutes from where I live. Not that there is very much here to explore mind you, but there does seem to be an abundant amount of antique malls not so conveniently placed about thirty minutes away in every direction.

I don't know how well I can set the scene, but I'll try. This particular store is almost literally in the middle of nowhere, so much so that even when the GPS tells you that you are in the right place, you think it must surely be wrong. When you leave the highway onto an unpaved road and only see a gas station to your right and the back of an unmarked red building(mall) straight ahead, it feels more like your pulling off into a truck stop then an antique mall. It does seem a little weird to approach a business from the back, but they do like to do things backwards here.

The mall itself is fairly large, consisting of two long hallways of booths. The first hallway was pretty much the same as any antique mall, by that I mean that there is a lot of neat stuff that is all way over priced.

Anyway fast forwarding ahead a little, to the second row. I could tell right away that this row was going to be much better as there were noticeably much more reasonable priced items.

Then about 4 spots down I came across the holy grail of antique mall booths:

I will try and describe the sheer awesomeness of this setup. So on the left there are vintage board games, vintage greeting cards, some toys, sports cards, and tons of philatelic items (i.e. stamps, old domestic and foreign covers, first day covers, postcards etc.). On the right there are about two dozen boxes of misc. paper ephemera, boxes of vintage dog tags(animal). And even though you really can see them in the picture there are a plethora of binders full of cards, coins(mostly foreign), milk caps, tokens, Magic: the Gathering, trade cards, postcards, and more paper ephemera. The back shelves are just loaded with sports cards consisting of sets, lots of singles, team bags, sealed packs and more.

The singles boxes were divided by sport and team. The prices in this booth seem to be a bit odd, in that half the items are overpriced and the other half are underpriced. I was pretty thorough in going through everything, but I feel like there was still a lot that I didn't get to. I must admit that I got very overwhelmed with this much to search through.

I should probably mention too, that the cards in this post are only about half of what I got. The rest will have to wait until a future post.

And now the cards:


1959 Topps Tom Morgan #545

At $1.50 I thought this was pretty good deal.


1962 Post Nellie Fox #47

There were 5 or 6 Post cards, but this was the only one under $10. For $2.00 I was going to leave Nellie there with his overpriced brethren.


1969 Topps Deckle Edge Frank Howard #16

50 cents for Mr. Howard.


1970 Topps Scratch off Tim McCarver and Richie Allen -both unscratched

I know these aren't rare, but I never see them anywhere other than online. I think these were both $1.00 each.


1971 Topps Billy Martin and Bobby Bonds

These two were both 50 cents each.


And I will end with a bounty of 1979 Hostess cards

All of these were 50 cents apiece.

Thurman was $1.50

Pops was $2.00

This was my one splurge item at $7.50, I don't think I overpaid but it still seemed like a lot.

So there you have it. Not a bad haul from an unlikely source.