Little self-control

 

The newest Beckett Vintage Collector magazine with my article in it arrived in my mailbox Monday.

This is article No. 11 for BVC and 13th overall for Beckett and I'm already formulating some story topics for future issues. Hope to get those to the editor next week.

This article is kind of a fun one, even though I dealt with a rare case of writer's block during the process. It covers the wide variety of cards -- "oddballs" to you and me -- that must be cut from a package, or sheet, or what have you, in order for it to become, you know, an actual card.

The problem is that in many cases (not all), the moment the card is trimmed away, it decreases in value.

That's what the article is about. Do you cut the thing to pieces or keep it pristine?

I decided to find as many examples of these kinds of cards that I could and the Beckett art department really went the extra mile finding images. I try to send in images of what I'm writing about, but there is no way I had all these. Here is one of the pages, as an example:

The April-May issue (Babe Ruth on the cover) should start appearing in Barnes & Noble and other magazine racks by the end of the month.

Meanwhile, I tried to come up with some topic related to this article for a blog post. I probably should have shown the Hostess cards that Bob sent me with this post instead of yesterday. Oh well.

Instead, what I have are the only items in my collection in which I have not cut the item down to card size. I admit, I use scissors freely. I have almost zero self-control in this area. The few items that I've left intact are things sent to me by other collectors in almost every case. Chances are if I bought it myself, I'd have that thing down-sized in no time.

I've shown this a few times and it's in the magazine article. The only reason this Hostess box has not been ravaged for the cards is: a) it was generously sent to me; b) I have the Ron Cey in card form already. Here's hoping Waits and Bumbry aren't the last two cards I need to complete the 1977 Hostess set.

 

I own 1990 Target cards separated into individual cards and as 3x5 sheets. One of the reasons I've kept the sheets untouched is because the odd shape of the individual cards creates storing issues. I still have the individual cards in this set stacked up on a shelf in my card desk, waiting for the day the light bulb over my head flicks on.

No cutting required with this 1977 Burger Chef tray. All you need to do is punch out the individual cards! But I've resisted. This is too fun as it is.

This arrived from Baseball Dad long ago (remember him?). He's an Indians fan and I've kept this intact ever since.

I'm sure you've seen these cards in the wild as separate entities. I just showed one not too long ago. But the 1987 Indians team has remained teammates on cardboard for as long as I've owned this. Probably the odd shape of the cards has kept me from cutting them up.

 

The only full baseball card sheets I own are minor league sets issued in 2009/2010, including team sets from the Albuquerque Isotopes for each year.

Sheets like this are very cool and not easy to separate anyway.

The trouble with these sheets and really almost all kinds of cards that come like this, whether on boxes or panels or whatever, is how the hell do you store them?

Just about the only examples of cards like these that I have purchased myself that I have not broken down into individual cards are the 1970s Hostess panels that I've bought. I've been able to use three-pocket pages to store them very nicely in a binder.

But for the other stuff?

The 1990 Target pages sit on a shelf with various other unrelated things, such as baseball figurines and old price guides. The 1987 Indians fold-out sits in a drawer where I keep extra nine-pocket pages and non-standard size top-loaders.

The Hostess box and the Burger Chef tray reside in a binder of oddball issues, too big for a page really. And the Albuquerque sheets are stashed behind a book case -- truly out of sight, out of mind. I kind of wondered whether I still had them.

This is why I am almost always cutting these things down to card size.

That and I have almost no self-control.