Night Owl Cards

I think I've figured out a temporary work-around with my temperamental scanner that will allow me to scan items until I can get a new one, or at least fix the current one. So you should be seeing freshly-scanned cards in the posts to come. But meanwhile, I'm taking advantage of a post by Shoebox Legends a week or so ago in which he cleared out his scan folder of images and magically created new content! I can't think of any more perfect time to create such a post than when your scanner is on the blink! Normally, I don't have a lot of leftover scans (I certainly don't have all the spare autographs and fancy stuff I saw in Fuji's "I Just Had These Lying Here" post). Pretty much everything that I scan winds up showing up on Night Owl Cards. But I managed to scare up a few images that will generate some words from me. Some of these pictures were dedicated to posts that never were, some never made a post I wrote. I guess they were cut for time ....

Even as a youngster, when my world was nothing much more than Scooby-Doo cartoons on a Saturday morning, I knew that 1971 Topps was different. I just didn't know why. I didn't know that the bad guy wore the black hat. I didn't know that motorcycle riders wore black for a reason. I didn't know that black made the Oakland Raiders "outlaws." I just knew that '71 Topps had black borders and they looked AMAZING . The '71 Topps set came out four years before I started collecting. But like most sets of that time period, I would see a card here and a card there. The thought of owning one '71 card consumed me. Then, when I owned one, I couldn't stop thinking about how cool it would be to own five. Today, I am 36 cards away from completing the set. Something that for years I thought would be an impossibility is getting closer and closer to being reality. Turning the pages of a binder filled with entirely black-bordered cards is still a thrill, b...

If you don't know what 1972 song this post title refers to, then I know one thing about you already: your name is not Brandy. Because if it was, you would have had this song sung to you at least 5,000 times over the course of your life so far, probably a quarter of those times by some drunk in a bar. But if you're not Brandy (what a good wife you would be), and you're not familiar with the dulcet tones of 1970s pop rock, then you probably aren't all that familiar with the 1972 Topps set either. And that's a shame. It is one of the best -- certainly one of the quirkiest sets -- that Topps has ever produced. It is one of my favorites. It is the subject of one blog , which has grown distressingly quiet of late. And it is a new object of affection for one of our favorite bloggers . To that one blogger, some advice: save yourself. OK, not really. But collecting this set is fairly challenging. I'm barely a third of the way through completing it and it's a daunt...