Old cards from an old card show

Now that I'm caught up with all of the packages that I've recently received from fellow bloggers [note: I started to write this before getting a PWE from Fuji the other day], I thought it might be a good idea to catch up on/recap the acquisitions from the card show that I attended at the end of July.

After the show at the end of June, I didn't think that I would be going to another one until the big one in September, so this was kind of an impromptu show attendance for me, as I had only decided the day before that I wanted to go. As a quick aside, to anybody who's within a couple of hours drive to Nashville -- who are wondering if the big 200 table show on September 29th is worth driving to? -- Let me just say, Yes! It'll be worth the trip. There will probably be sellers from at least a dozen states set up, and attendees from even more, by all accounts, it's the closest thing to going to The National... without actually having to go to The National.

So anyway, even though the trip was hastily planned, thanks to some eBay sales, I at least had some money to spend, and for once... I actually didn't spend it all!

It should be no surprise that this first post will be nothing but vintage, especially since I always start out the series of card show recaps with the oldies.

The 59's that you're going to see were actually my last purchase from the day, all coming from a guy named Tom, who has quickly become my second favorite seller at these shows. He had five stacks of 59's (probably around 300 cards in total), after over a month now I can't remember how they were priced, but it was basically a "the more you buy, the more you save" kind of deal.

I really like the 1959 Topps set, and might try to build it someday, but for now I just picked up cards that will be going into some recently started mini-collections -- except the Sauer, he was free since he had a hole in the middle of his card.

The Warren Giles isn't going to be part of any collection, I've just really wanted that card for a long time now.

Even if I never get around to (or get the money to) working on the set, I'd at least like to get all of the "rising sun" cards. It was nice to be able to add a few more to that collection, especially when a few of those featured the likes of Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, and Ted Williams.

I already had these two, but mine were of a much lower grade.

I'd also like to complete The Sporting News subset... I think it's safe to say that I made some pretty good progress on that front.

I'll have to get another Johnny Callison at some point, because this one (as well as the Tony Taylor in the first picture) went into my Telstar collection.

Like I said, I don't remember exactly how much all of the 59's were, but I think they ended up averaging out to around 60-65 cents a card, which seemed like a pretty solid deal to me.

Don't worry baseball fans, there's more for you at the end of the post, but for now...

... take a look...

... at all...

... of these...

... 1980-81 Topps!

There's so many here that I couldn't even...

... stretch that sentence to cover them all.

These were my second to last purchase of the day, and they were also my favorite purchase of the day.

They came from an older dealer who I've bought from many a times in the past. He's had some really good dime boxes in the past, but this particular show's boxes might have been the best so far... yeah, these all came from a dime box!

I couldn't believe that they were still sitting in this box over three hours after the show had started, sometimes I really don't understand other collector's. Internally, I did happy dance when I came across this stack, as I just don't see cards from this set very often, and when I do, there usually priced at a lot more than a dime apiece.

Initially I just checked one or two for condition, upon seeing how nice they were, I just grabbed the whole stack. I went through them after I got home, obviously I was hoping for one of Bird/Magic RC combinations to be in there -- not surprisingly there wasn't, but there was still some decent names in there, guys that should be more of a household name than they are.

I found quite a few other things in those dime boxes, some of which will be seen in upcoming posts. This '72 Sawx team card was the only other thing of a vintage that I came across in there though.

Another Sawx team card, this time from 1961. I can't remember which seller this came from, or how much it was, but it's still a neat card... which technically speaking, could be considered a Ted Williams card.

The last couple of cards in this post were the biggies (money wise), and all came from my, and everybody else's, favorite dealer, Jim.

Usually Jim is set up right when the show opens, so by the time I get there (about an hour after the doors open), his stuff has already been picked over, not that that has stopped me from getting plenty of great cards from him over the last couple of years.

This time was a little different though, as he had gotten hung up in traffic, and didn't get to the show until about twenty minutes after I did. Probably annoying for him, but good for me, because I was actually gonna get to see his wares as they were being put out -- the first, and last time, that this will probably happen.

It was really interesting to see him arrive, and then see the throng of collectors surround him as he walked to his tables, it was kind of like a card show version of The Beatles entering the room. Most of those guys were practically frothing at the mouth in anticipation for him to put out his high end autograph/relic boxes, which were worked for me, as I was just hoping that he would have a few of his legendary dime boxes, as well as some vintage to look through.

By the time I walked over, he was just starting put stacks of vintage out, and nobody else seemed to care... at least for a minute or two.

There is another dealer at the show who buys a lot of Jim's vintage stuff, takes it back to his tables, and marks it up to absurd (at least in my mind) prices. I'm not particularly fond of this guy (he tried to collection shame me at one of the first shows I attended after moving here), but I'm going to try and not say anything to negative about him. As expected, it didn't take him long to show up, but by then I already had a stack, as I had zoomed through 200-300 cards in about 2 1/2 minutes.

My initial stack was made up of the above '71 Ryan and '68 Maris, as well as a 1969 Reggie Jackson rookie, a '54 Topps Warren Spahn, a '72 Mazeroski, a 1955 Topps All-American (I can't remember who), and some other card that I can't remember. Now I didn't think that I was actually going to be able to afford all of these, but I figured that wouldn't hurt to see what the price would be.

As expected, the price was up there, mostly because of the Reggie, which was probably in gradable condition. So after hearing the price, I started whittling down the stack, asking how much the total would be after each card had been removed.

The stack got down to three cards, and I found out that I could either get the 1972 Mazeroski (high number), or for just $5 more, I could get the Nolan Ryan and Roger Maris... this ended up not being a very difficult decision. The Ryan a fairly iconic card, and I've wanted Roger's sunset card for quite a while now, Maz just couldn't compete.

Also, am I wrong, or is '68 Topps the first year that you started seeing guy's wearing a batting glove? Roger Maris, Jimmie Hall, and Johnny Callison are all shown sporting a glove. There might be more, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. And I don't remember seeing anybody wearing one in a set prior to 1968.

I was interested in this card as well, because I bought the other two cards, this one was tossed in for free. It's creased up a bit, but it's my first Uecker, and it was free, so it's kind of hard to complain about the condition too much.

This was two shows in a row that I've been able to find some really neat vintage cards, for some really neat prices, fingers crossed for the show at the end of this month. And for anyone interested, I have three more posts coming up that'll be covering all of the non-vintage baseball, basketball, and football cards that were gotten at this show.


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The best of the rest: part 2

As promised, today's post will cover the rest of the basketball content from the now, almost month ago, card show.

Tony Battie may not have had the most successful career, but finding this 1997-98 Topps redemption was still pretty cool, as usually I only come across the expired redemption cards.

Scanning these together like this, almost makes them look like one card.

There is a high probability that I already own these, but Clearcut's are one of those inserts that I always feel compelled to buy when found in dime boxes.

While looking down at Jim's dime boxes, I spotted a card that was about as thick as seven normal cards, it turned out to be a 2012-13 Elite Series Glass Masters. It's made out of plastic, but it's heavy and see-through, like a piece of glass. I'm not terribly interested in owning cards of Amar'e (such a waste of talent), but I'll probably hang on to it for the novelty factor.

This is a really nice assortment, and I think that I actually need all of them too.

I have got to be close to completing this set, what with finding another half a dozen and all. Bobby Hurley looks like he's working out in his high school gym.

I think I have like 3 or 4 copies of the Shareef Exclusives card now, I really need to stop buying those, or at least start finding some folks to pawn 'em off on.

Fleer sure had a lot of inserts during the 90's!

The Gary Payton Planet Metal is the only card in this post that didn't cost either 10 or 25 cents, for it I had to shell out a $1, which was totally worth it by the way. I was hoping that the semi-holographic background would scan well, it didn't.

I almost never find SLU cards, so coming across Spud was a nice surprise. Jeremy Lamb is from the 2012-13 Taco Bell set, making him only second one of those that I've ever seen, not that I've really been looking for them though.

I remember these Behind The Glass inserts being kind of a big deal when they came out back in '93, now, like most of the cards in this post, they're just dime box fodder.

One thing that I don't miss about 90's inserts, is the sets that were dedicated to one specific person, I mean I guess they still do it now, but it isn't as prevalent as it once was. That being said, I still had to grab these Shaq Talk's, and they are actually the first two that I've ever owned. Hardwood Leaders is another insert set that I can't seem to stop buying, even though I finished it sometime in the late 90's.

Believe it or not, this Robert Parish Fleer Super Star is my favorite card in this post, if only because I really miss the days of being able to get an insert of someone like Robert Parish.

One of these days I'm going to have to make some sort of checklist for all of my 90's basketball inserts. Right now, I have them housed in five binders and an almost full shoebox (of the two row variety), the shoebox is reserved for the "good" stuff. Everything is sorted by year and set, but without a list, it doesn't do too much good as I very rarely remember what I do and don't have.

Technically speaking, I still have one more group of cards from the show that I haven't gotten too, but I was going to wait and see if I go to this weekend's show or not, before posting about them. I realize that that might not make too much sense, but I promise it will when I get around to talking about said group of cards.


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A short post about small cards

Before I decided to start collecting minis (A&G and Golden Age), I almost never came across them in person -- and since I made the decision to collect them, I hadn't come across a single one, at least not until this most recent show... where I ended up finding a whole dozen (crazy, I know)!

The number of minis that were bought may not be too impressive, but I thought that the subject matter of some of them was, so...

Young Jon was into all things paranormal/supernatural, he believed every non-fiction book, and never doubted any story that was featured on a television show (Sightings, Unsolved Mysteries, etc.). Old Jon is extremely cynical about such things, but he still likes these cards.

I'm guessing that the reason that I still have no idea what the whole "Ginter code" thing is all about, is because I'm so late to the A&G party, although if I'm being honest... I don't really care enough to try and go read about it.

This was the first time that I had seen on of the Seven Seas inserts, pretty nifty!

Finding out that there are cards of people like St. Germain only reaffirms my decision to start working on some of these sets.

2010 seems to have been a good year for A&G inserts.

All the cards in this post were 5/$1, except for this speckled Trout, in order to land him, I had to reach into my pocket and fish out two quarters.

I even found a needed Golden Age mini, which I believe is now officially the first one that I've ever found in the wild.

Hopefully no ones getting tired of these card show posts yet, because I still have a few more to go!


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Buybacks, buybacks, and more buybacks

My infatuation with buybacks has been waning for the last couple of months, I can't really explain why it has exactly, I just know that my interest level isn't anywhere near what it was two years ago when I started my frankenset.

With that in mind, it seems kind of ironic that I would now stumble upon a proverbial mother lode at the show two weeks ago.

I found the first couple in Jim's 5/$1 boxes, upon seeing me pull them out, Jim mentioned that he had added quite a few to his dime boxes. Eventually I got over to those dime boxes, and "quite a few" was right, all in all, I ended up with 158 of them.

I knew when I was adding all of these to my pile, that I would most likely not be keeping too many of them, but since a lot of other folks seem to be collecting buybacks now, I figured it wouldn't be too hard to find some interested parties. Initially I only had 3 or 4 other people in mind, but after showing the picture above on Twitter, a number of other people came forward and asked if I had any of this team or that team, for most part I did, so why not spread the wealth out a little more. Plus, as I was going through them a little more thoroughly, I noticed some that I thought might appeal to a few more people, so that ended up dividing the pile up even more. When all was said and done, 147 (I took out 11 for myself) buybacks have been split up and are (and will be) sent out to 18 different people... not too shabby for a days work!

Not wanting to show all of these, I thought instead I would just show the eleven that, for the moment, I am tentatively keeping -- tentatively being the key word.

For what it's worth, I can now say that I own a Roberto Clemente buyback!

A pair of Hall of Famer's.

Higuera was the last name of one of my first best friends in life, so I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Teddy's cards.

I was a big fan of Raul's when he was with Seattle, and I liked Jason when he was still with the Braves.

Remember when pulling a McGwire card was a big deal? Seems like a lifetime ago doesn't it?

With the stamp, it makes this card look like it says Rediscover dinals... which makes me laugh!

Among all the Topps Rediscover cards, I found three A&G buybacks as well. This one was the only one that I had planned on keeping.

To anyone who's getting some of this horde from me, stay tuned, as you might end up getting more in a couple of months should I decide that my interest in buybacks truly is no more [spoiler alert: I am really leaning in that direction].


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Cubs, trains, and other assorted vintage goodies

Two Saturday's ago was a card show day, and not to brag or anything, but I think I did pretty well.

Having not been to a show since March, I was really looking forward to this one. However, I wasn't looking forward to going and having considerably less money to spend than usual, thankfully though, I ended up selling a fairly rare record for a decent chunk of change about a week before the show... so I had plenty of paper folding money to play with. The only downside was that I probably should have been trying to save some of it for potential future wants, but no matter how old I get, I'm still like a small child when it comes to money, in that, if I have it, I spend it!

As per usual, I'll be spreading out the purchases across four or five posts, starting first with the vintage portion, as that always seems to be the most popular with readers.

My favorite seller (he's a lot of other people's favorite seller as well), Jim, was there with his usual array of insanely low priced items. This time though, he had a large selection of vintage cards, which isn't the norm for him, not surprisingly, going through those vintage cards was my first priority upon seeing them (I always go to his tables first).

Have you noticed how many people seem to be in a collecting funk as of late? I guess this is a good time to mention that you can add my name to that list as well. It sounds like a lot of folks are becoming disenfranchised over the ever increasing amount of new products flooding the market, and even though that's not what's causing my malaise, I can certainly understand why it would be having such a negative impact on so many people.

This post is already fixin' to be excruciatingly long (hopefully in a good way though), so I don't want to get too deep into this right now, but the short of it is, that I realized a couple of months ago that I just wasn't having very much fun collecting cards (or anything else for that matter) anymore.

Set collecting, vintage baseball set collecting, to be more specific, has been causing me a great deal of stress as of late, and collecting should never be stressful. I'll go into more detail in a future post, but for the moment, I can tell you that I have stopped working on a number of vintage sets (they've been removed from my want lists too).

For some time now, I've been thinking about starting a side collection of guys who played in the PCL, so now with a bunch cards from broken up sets sitting around doing nothing, I thought that this might be a good time to start putting together such a collection... apparently I was wrong! It only took a couple of days of trying to figure out who played where for me to get overwhelmed, so for the moment that idea is going to be shelved, and will likely revisited at the end of summer.

Some of you might be wondering why I even bothered going to the show then? And that would be an easy question to answer, I went because there's a number of sets that I still do enjoy collecting. There's also a number of sets that I have no illusions about ever being able to finish, but still enjoy getting cards from, case in point, the '49, '51, and '52 Bowman's that you've already seen.

I've been on a bit of a Bowman kick ever since I found that cheap '52 Bowman Casey Stengel back in March. And like I said, I know I'll never be able to finish these, but that's okay, I'm just having fun picking up cheap semi-decent condition examples when I can. I have a few currently sitting in my COMC account too, all though, with these old Bowman's, I've noticed that for me, it's much more fun to buy them at shows, than to buy them online. I don't know if that makes any sense or not, but hopefully somebody what I'm talking about.

This is only my third '55. I'd love to know the story behind Gene Baker's giant Band-Aid.

I have mixed feelings about this set, mainly because of the action shots. I mean, some are so cool, like with this Hank Sauer, while others are of guy's just standing there doing nothing, which is kind of the opposite of "action". Either way though, I had to have this one.

Hey, this guy was pretty good, wasn't he? I didn't realize how many vintage Ernie Banks' that I had until I started going through all of my recently stopped sets. Even though I've shown most of them on the blog at one time or another, I'm thinking that I might try to get all of 'em into one post coming up in the near future.

One thing that I'm definitely not giving up on, is the Post sets. Unbeknownst to me, and I'm pretty sure Jim too, the Frank Thomas is a short print, and one of the harder to find one's to boot. There seems to be no rhyme or reason with the Post short prints, at least in my mind, so I was kind of surprised to find this out after I got home that day.

Another thing that I've been thinking about doing is to start a few mini-collections, which is something that a lot of you do, but I've always been a set collector, so this is kind of new territory for me. Recently I was reading a book that had a chapter about the first live transatlantic television broadcast on July 23rd, 1962. As part of that broadcast, a 90 second clip of a Cubs-Phillies game was shown, so I thought it might be kind of fun to start a collection of the four player's who were featured in that clip -- George Altman, Calvin Koonce, Johnny Callison, and Tony Taylor.

This guy was pretty good too. My first vintage Lou Brock. It's off center, has some scratches in the middle, and a crease at the bottom... but I don't care, it's still a cool card!

As I mentioned, Jim doesn't usually have a lot of vintage, so I was pleasantly surprised to see all of it when I got there. When he does have it, they're usually just stacked up in top loaders in the middle of the table, between his dime boxes, 5/$1 boxes, etc.

None of them are priced, and if it was anybody but him, I wouldn't even bother -- but after buying stuff from him for over three years now, I know that once you ask him how much? He's not going to reach for a Beckett, or check anything on his phone -- he'll just look at everything, and give you a price, a price that is usually negotiable too. So what was the price that I was quoted for all of the above? $42... sold! Even though his prices are always low, I still expected the quote to be higher.

If anybody thinks that that price seems like a lot, well, you remember that Frank Thomas short print? It looks like that when it does come up on eBay, $40 or more, is not an uncommon selling price. I'm sort of feeling a bit guilty about that one, I might have to let him know about it the next time I see him, and give him a few extra bucks too. If it was someone else, I might not feel the same way about it, but it's Jim!

 

Behind his sports GU/auto's box, Jim usually has some non-sport relics/autos stacked up, this time being no exception, but he had also had a small stack of what were clearly tobacco cards back there as well. I might have missed them, had another dealer not come over and inquire about them. I guess that guy didn't think that he could flip them (even though I didn't hear a price being quoted), because he walked away, and then I pounced.

Jim knew that they were German tobacco cards, and that was about it, which was fine, because that's all I knew about 'em too.

Initially I was only interested in three of them, but when I asked for a price, Jim said "just the three?", to which I replied, "yeah, well... unless there's a discount for taking all of them". So he looked through the stack one more time, and said "how about four bucks?", which sounded like a really great deal for all sixteen of them, so I of course accepted.

I still haven't gotten around to trying to research this Schienen-Wunder set yet, but I will one of these days.

Jim had so much vintage this time, that some of it even made it's way into his dime boxes, namely a bunch of mid 70's basketball. Most of it was 1974-75 Topps, a set that I'm almost done with. Even though I figured that I wasn't going to need any of it, I still grabbed all of the nicer one's just in case any of them were in better shape than my copies.

On the following day when I was going through them, I was stunned to find that I actually needed two of them. With those removed from the checklist, I'm down to needing only seven.

I also found this 1972-73 Topps in his dime boxes as well. It's got a little bit of staining, but since I never come across vintage hockey cards, I thought it was still pretty cool. I thought it was kind of funny too, to see that COMC has this listed as the Stanley Cup's rookie card.

Moving on to a different seller, a guy named Tom, who was the only other person that I bought from that day. I've seen Tom set-up there a couple of times before (he's not a regular), but other than the exchanging of pleasantries, I had never really talked to him before. We ended up talking for about 20 minutes, which was kind of nice because my social anxiety usually prevents me from having such lengthy interactions. Although I think that my brain was too occupied with the ever increasing temperature inside the gym to notice that I was actually talking to someone. By 10am, the real feel outside was over 100 degrees, and I swear that it must have been like 90 inside, because I was getting a tad bit uncomfortable (understatement).

I don't know if the AC was having a problem or what, but it just kept getting hotter and hotter in there, and after having been there for three hours, I was now thinking that it might be a good time to leave. I probably didn't look through Tom's stuff as much as I should have, because he had a lot of good stuff, and a much larger spread than I've seen him have in the past. That being said, I still picked up quite a few neat things (more of which will be in subsequent posts).

Oh, and that '69 Lou Michaels up above, that was in a dime box, I was hoping that I would find more from that set, but the rest of that box was just mid 70's, aka stuff that I'm not collecting. I didn't look at my checklists at all, so I did end up with a few duplicates, Lou being one of them, so he's available if anyone's interested.

And one other thing to note, I ran out of usable sunlight on the day that I was doing these pictures, so the rest of the cards in this post were scanned. I only mention it because the scans look terrible to me.

The Hank Bauer was a buck, which didn't seem too bad considering that he's a high number. The Cepeda and Morgan were $2 each. All three of these are likely going to be part of some new mini-collections (I'm going all in on this approach to collecting).

All former PCL guys, and all were 20 cents each.

The condition of most of Tom's vintage cards was pretty amazing. These kind of got mixed up, so I can't remember which cards came from what box, but some were from the 5/$2 box, and then a couple were from the 5/$1 box -- not that it makes too much of a difference though, as they were really well priced either way.

The two 72's were in the 5/$1 box, I think I might already have both of them, but I still haven't double checked yet. Red was only a dime!

And finally, some more 72's from the 5/$1 box. Boog's a duplicate, so if anyone needs him, don't be shy about saying so.

Originally I had planned on doing three card show posts this week, but I've just been too tired to work on them, but I'll have one more on Saturday. And if I can be a little less rambly, maybe I can crank out the rest for next week, as I don't want to drag these out for too long.


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