A good buy

I don't know if anyone else ever does this or not, but sometimes when I'm searching eBay... and I happen upon something that I already own... and it's something that could be considered somewhat hard to find... and that something seems to be getting a lot of bids, I'll go ahead and put it in my watch list just to see what the final price ends up being. I mention this because two weeks ago just happened to be one of those times.

Before continuing, I'm going to take a quick trip back in time. It was right around three years ago (late as usual) that I discovered Panini's Golden Age, and completely fell in love with the brand. I can't remember now how it is that I came to find out about the sets, but almost immediately after doing so, I ordered a couple of boxes from Steel City Collectibles... and if I hadn't been completely hooked before, I definitely was after opening those boxes.

After the boxes had been opened, I started spending a lot of time searching the usual haunts in my attempt to find the best deals on cards -- autographs in particular -- from the sets that I didn't have... and Sportlots was of course one of those usual haunts.

The site had a pretty good selection, most likely because the sets were still somewhat new at the time. If I remember correctly, a lot of the prices were a bit on the high side... apparently that part hasn't changed too much in the last three years. There were two cheap autographs that really stood out though, both of which were being offered by the same seller.

The cheapest of those two autos, and the one that's the subject of this post, is the poorly scanned Carl Bernstein shown above. At the time, I couldn't find any sales records on eBay (or anywhere else), which told me that it might not be one of the more common autos in the set, so since you're seeing it, and I'm talking about it, you've probably already figured out that I ended up buying it (along with the other auto that the seller had).

Fast forwarding back to the present, or rather to two weeks ago when I was doing my usual weekly search for Golden Age on eBay, and I just happened to see the first Carl Bernstein auto come up since I had bought mine three years ago. The card seemed to be getting some attention, so into the watch list it went, and not because I have any intentions of selling it mind you, sometimes I just like to know what I have.

I should probably point out too, that when I say I haven't seen another one in the last three years, that's referring to auctions, as I rarely look for stuff in people's stores. So I'm sure a few others have come up as BIN's, but I'm pretty sure that this was the first one to come up for auction during this particular time period that I'm talking about.

After a couple of days, and many bids, the card ended up selling for $79, which might not seem like a lot to some of you, but three years ago when I bought mine, I only paid... $6! So in retrospect, that was a pretty good buy.

And even though it has nothing to do with this particular post, I know a few folks might be curious to know what was the other autograph that I had purchased from that seller, so here you go:

This was bought for $8, it routinely sells on eBay for anywhere between $35-$60, so I guess one could say that that was a pretty good purchase as well.

One other quick piece of info about these, is that even though the seller charged like $2.50 for shipping, both ended up being sent via PWE in just penny sleeves... with absolutely nothing else in the envelope to protect the cards. To say that I was annoyed at the time (and even still a little now) would be a massive understatement, and I definitely let seller know about it, who replied by asking me what the big deal was? Because they always shipped like that, and had never had any problems, which only ticked me off more. They did arrive unharmed (a minor miracle), but I still wasn't ever going to be buying from that seller again, and to this day, I still haven't.


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